THE RELIGION OF THE
SCRIPTURES
Papers from the Catholic Bible Congress
held at Cambridge, July 16—19, 1921
'Ignorafio Scripturarum ignoratio Chrisii est
[Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged.]
CAMBRIDGE
W. HEFFER & SONS LTD.
1921
LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
PRINCETON, N. J.
BS 540 ,R3 1921
The religion of the
Scriptures
THE RELIGION OF THE SCRIPTURES
THE RELIGION OF THE
SCRIPTURES
Papers from the Catholic Bible Congress
held at Cambridge, July i6 — 19, 1921
Edited by
The Rev. C. LATTEY, S. J.
(M.A., OxoN.)
Professor of Holy Scripture at St. Beuno's College,
North Wales, Author of Back to Christy etc.,
Joint Editor of the Westminster
Version of the Sacred
Scriptures
CatV^o\\c ^^iuw-rner "ScViool LectuYtrs
[^Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged.^
CAMBRIDGE
W. HEFFER & SONS LTD.
1921
First Edition
Nihil Obstat
L. W. Geddes, S.I.
Censor deputaius
Imprimatur
•i« Frederick William
Archbishop of Liverpool
Administrator of the Diocese of Northampton
June 23, ig2i
Second Edition
Nihil Obstat
L. W. Geddes, S.I.
Censor deputaius
Imprimatur
J. H. Canon Ashmole
Vicar Capitular of the Diocest of Northampton
October 13, 1921
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
At the time when this preface must be written the
CathoUc Bible Congress at Cambridge is still in the
future. Its essential character is that of a religious
celebration in honour of the fifteenth centenary of St.
Jerome, the great bibhcal doctor of the Latin rite, as
St. John Chrysostom was that of the Greek ; the former
especially eminent in work upon the Old Testament, the
latter in work upon the New, the former powerful in
work as a pioneer of Western asceticism, the latter
glorious for all time as the model of the Christian
preacher. The present is a time especially opportune
for honouring St. Jerome, seeing that his great work,
the Latin Version of the Bible known as the Vulgate,
is about to renew its youth, brought forth in primitive
accuracy through the learned labours of Cardinal
Gasquet and the Benedictine commission. The Vulgate,
in origin and revision, will be one of the dominating
thoughts of the Congress, and in this httle book receives
a full meed of praise from one competent to bestow it.
But a more profound purpose underUes the Congress.
With Pope Leo XIIL's issue of the encychcal Providen-
ttssimus Deus in 1893 began a new era for Bibhcal
studies in the Church, which from that time have made
steady advance, ever deepening and widening their
course. In the recent encychcal Spiritus Paracliius
the present Holy Father prays " for all the children of
the Church, that penetrated and strengthened by the
vi PREFACE
sweetness of Holy Writ, they may attain to the sur-
passing knowledge of Jesus Christ." To help them in
so holy a purpose is a further object of the Congress,
and indeed, to contribute something to that " right
interpretation, defence and pious meditation of Holy
Scripture " for which the Holy Father desires supplica-
tion through St. Jerome to be made (Acta Apostolicae
Sedis, Vol. XH., pp. 422, 440).
The mention of " defence " brings us to another aspect
of the matter. The Providentissimus Deus is also a
landmark in the progress of rationalism ; it meant that
the Holy See recognised that the absolute authority of
the written Word of God was no longer acknowledged
by all who called themselves Christians. And this fact
has a peculiar significance for our country, where there
are many, it may be hoped, who have not lost their love
for Holy Writ, and would gladly retain their faith in it.
These, too, the Congress is designed in some measure to
help, and of necessity the Congress papers also.
The central theme chosen for the lectures, and con-
sequently for this book, has been the practical issue of
Biblical religion. A preliminary explanation of the
Catholic standpoint has been ably drawn up by two
fathers of the Catholic Missionary Society. The religion
of the Old Testament, and thereafter the religion of the
New, is then set forth, both on the institutional side
(the Law, the Church), and in its more personal appeal
(the Prophets, Christ). The paper from Dr. Barry is
of itself a pertinent reminder that St. Jerome in his
scholarly and penitential life purposed to be, and in
truth was, an exponent of Biblical religion to Western
civilisation. " Ignorance of the Scriptures," he declares
in the prologue to his commentary upon Isaiah, in words
PREFACE vii
that find applauding echo alike in the Providentissimus
Deus and the Spiritus Paraclitus, " is ignorance of
Christ." Finally, His Lordship the Bishop of Salford,
offers us a good illustration of the way in which even
eminent scholars may pass from exact philology to
somewhat reckless processes of " higher criticism."
Such methods are so great a hindrance to solid and
responsible Biblical study that His Lordship's remarks
form an apt and welcome conclusion to this little book,
a plea that Holy Scripture must be saved even from
some would-be friends.
In dealing with such vast subjects, the writers of these
papers have found themselves obliged to be content
with the mere selection of what seemed most important
and relevant. Here, too, it must be enough to indicate
the most vital conclusion. In Holy Scripture we have
documents pointing to a very high form of religious
experience, and setting forth the conditions under which
it was realised, at first in an imperfect form under the
Old Covenant, and then in the developed universalism
of the New. Three elements appear to dominate this
experience, namely, faith as the root of the whole, love
as the vital sap, the driving force, leading to entire self-
surrender to a personal God, speaking of old through the
prophets, and in the end through His Incarnate Son —
and finally, organic life, without which religion lacks
the unity and responsibility demanded alike by human
nature and the Infinite Majesty of God. In place of
this we find about us a blind groping after the truth, an
intolerable disunion, a nervous fear to commit oneself,
or even that desire to test results which inevitably
viii PREFACE
excludes from all that is noblest and best in religious
experience.
Faith, intellectual affirmation, is in fact essential to
the experience ; any other assumption proves at long
last to be fundamentally wrong. Even according to the
modern Gospel, the very experience should be its own
guarantee, the surpassing quantity and quality of the
religious experience engendered by fidelity to the
principles outlined above. Nevertheless, one must be
quit of ignorant prejudice, and the cant about " formal-
ism " and the like, which sometimes blinds the eyes of
the unwary. To see clearly and to understand will at
least be an invitation to partake : to partake is to thirst
for more : to drink deep is to know none other wine.
C. L.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The rapid sale of the first edition of a thousand copies is
yet another welcome sign that the Catholic Bible Congress
has in large measure fulfilled its purpose. This success
it is only right to record, though it be but briefly.
Whether from a religious and liturgical point of view,
or by reason of the numbers and attention of those who
assisted, or again in regard of the gracious welcome
extended by Town and University, it was a wonderful
fulfilment to an undertaking too novel to be altogether
free from misgivings. From the present writer, as
organizer of the lectures, are due hearty thanks to all
the lecturers, and also to the executive committee, with
whom he found it easy to work in perfect harmony.
His Grace the present Archbishop of Liverpool, from
whom came the first initiative. His Eminence the Cardinal
Archbishop of Westminster, His Grace the Archbishop of
Birmingham, and the other Bishops of the Hierarchy, are
evidently to be regarded as the founders rather than as
the benefactors of the Congress; but their presence in
strength made their support all the more powerful.
Shortly before the meeting of the Congress, and pre-
sumably by way of antidote, a pamphlet appeared in
Cambridge, which has since passed into a second edition.
In the discussion of one of the chief points — in a manner
by far the chief point — the present writer felt himself
called upon to take some part. This has resulted in a
lengthy appendix to the second edition of the pamphlet ;
X PREFACE
a reply upon the main issue will be found in an Appendix
to this volume. For a discussion of other issues raised,
however, it may be well to refer to the Tablet for the
present year (many numbers) and to the Dublin Review
(January and September); also to articles by F.
Thurston, S.J., in the Month for August, 1921 ("Bible
Reading and Bible Prohibition") and in the Catholic
Encyclopedia (Vol. V., 1909: "England before the
Reformation"). In the Catholic Encyclopedia Fr.
Thurston notes that the view that the so-called Wycliffe
Bible has no connexion with Wyclif, "cannot be said
to have found general acceptance" (pp. 441-2). In
the August Month he writes: "It is the general opinion
of those who have paid most attention to this special
branch of research — not only of Catholics like Janssen
and Jostes, but also of such non-Catholic authorities
as Walther, Gairdner and S. Berger — that the Church
of the Middle Ages did not systematically keep the Bible
out of the hands of the people or forbid vernacular
renderings on principle" (p. 159).
A little after the Catholic Bible Congress, the " Modern
Churchmen's Conference" was held at Cambridge, a
grim set-off thereto, and to all that is written in the
original preface to this work. The editorial preface
to the Cambridge Conference Number of The Modern
Churchman refers to "the note of affirmation which
runs all through the Christological papers," and of the
effort of the Conference leaders to be constructive. To
most readers will be more painfully evident the absence
of any clear assertion of the one great affirmation that
matters, that Christ is truly God, as the Scriptures most
certainly teach. Though, indeed, it is not difficult to
see that God Himself is to be the next "problem" for
PREFACE xi
Christianity of this type. If, however, being such as
He is, He has vouchsafed a revelation to man, then to
grope about in the dark is not freedom, not even " genuine
intellectual freedom," but blindness. In that flood of
admirable light to live and love to the uttermost — such
at least is the Religion of the Scriptures.
C. L.
CONTENTS.
PAG&
I. INSPIRATION I
By the Rev. J. P. Arendzew, D.D., M.A., Old
Testament Professor at St. Edmund's College,
Ware, and the Rev. R. Downey, D.D., both of
the Catholic Missionary Society, London.
II. THE MOSAIC LAW ,8
By the Rev. T. E. Bird, D.D., Ph.D., Professor of
Holy Scripture at Oscott College, Birmingham.
III. THE PROPHETS ^,
By the Rev. C. Lattey, S.J., M.A.
IV. CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT - - 56
By the Rev. C. C. Martindale, S.J., M.A., of
Campion Hall, Oxford (author of The Life of
Robert Hugh Benson, The New Testament, etc.)
V. THE ORGANIZED CHURCH IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT 71
By the Rev. R. A. Knox, M.A., of St. Edmund's
College, Ware, sometime Fellow of Trinity
College, Oxford (author of A Spiritual Aeneid,
Meditations on the Psalms, etc.)
VI. ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER - - 87
By Canon William Barry, D.D., Rector of St.
Peter's, Leamington, sometime Professor of
Theology at Oscott College (author of The
Tradition of Scripture, etc.)
VII. THE GENESIS OF A MYTH : A Note on the
Supposed Origin of Tobit (Tobias) - - loi
By the Rt. Rev. L. C. Casartelli, Bishop of Salford
M.A., D.Litt.Or., D.D., Hon. M.R.A.S., some-
time Professor of Zend and Pehlevi at Louvain
University (author of La Philosophie religieust
du MazdHsme sous les Sassanides, etc.)
VIII. APPENDIX : Dr. Coulton and the Heavenly
Witnesses
By the Rev. C. Lattey, S.J M.A.
107
I.
INSPIRATION.
By the Rev. J. P. Arendzen, D.D., M.A., and the
Rev. R. Downey, D.D.
According to the Catholic Church the Bible is
different from all other books in the world in that it is
INSPIRED, What does she mean by this word inspired ?
She does not mean it in an off-hand, general, vague sort
of sense in which Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, or other
great poets are said to be inspired, or as great reformers,
poHticians, lawyers may be inspired in expressing high
ideals. The inspiration she predicates of the Bible is
different not merely in degree but in kind, from that
human enthusiasm for the beautiful, the noble, the good,
which carries away poets and pohticians in their speeches
and books. The Catholic Church means something not
merely human, but something in a unique sense divine.
Again she does not mean that the Bible is merely a
record of an inspired nation or of the careers of inspired
prophets, such as Moses, Isaias, or Amos. The Old
Testament does indeed contain the record of a divine
revelation, but such a record might well in itself be
merely human, not divine.
She does not mean that the contents of the Bible
are necessarily revealed by God, for obviously the Bible
contains a great deal that is not revealed at all — long
books full of historical records, in some cases laboriously
I
2 INSPIRATION
gathered from pre-existing works and writings, such as
the Book of the Wars of the Lord, or the five books of
Jason, of which II. Maccabees is a resume, or the sources
which St. Luke diligently searched and often verbally
copied into his gospel.
She does not mean that inspiration is necessarily a sort
of conscious state of the writer when he penned his
inspired book. Obviously in many cases the inspired
writer did not himself know that he was inspired.
Apparently St. Luke did not know, clearly the author
of II. Maccabees did not know, otherwise he would
scarcely have asked the leniency of his readers for his
literary shortcomings. Some authors may have known
personally that they were inspired, but the Catholic
Church has in no individual case decided whether they
knew or not.
She does not mean that the Bible is merely guaranteed
by God as being true and containing no error. Inerrancy
is one thing, inspiration another. She believes the ex
cathedra definition of Popes to be infallibly true, but
she has never made the claim that they were inspired.
It is infallibly true to say that there was a war between
England and Germany from 1914 to 1918, but the state-
ment could hardly be described as inspned.
She does not mean that the Bible in a supreme sort
of way is devotional or stimulating to faith or piety, or
that it is the highest expression of souls in mystic union
of God. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas k Kempis
IS much more devotional, sublime, and stimulating to
piety than, say, the Book of Leviticus or Numbers or
Ecclesiastes.
She does not mean by inspiration the drawing up of
the catalogue or list of books, put by her in the Canon
INSPIRATION 3
of Scripture, or the Library of Sacred Books of Jewry
and Christianity, as if her registration in the official
rehgious hbrary of Christianity or her official sanction
and approval made these books inspired. She utterly
repudiates such a notion. She cannot make a book
inspired, though she believes herself empowered in-
fallibly to decide that a book has been inspired by God.
She does not mean that the Sacred Books are inspired
because they have been written by prophets or apostles.
In many instances she does not know who wrote the
books of the Old Testament — to suppose that prophets
wrote them would be utterly gratuitous. Mark and
Luke were not apostles ; the end of Mark may be by a
person totally unknown. She does not teach as of
faith that St. Peter approved of St. Mark, or St. Paul
of St. Luke, as if apostolic approbation were of the
essence of inspiration. Inspired for her is far more
than merely being backed by the authority of prophets
or apostles.
She does not mean that the Old Testament is accounted
inspired because it is the official sacred literature of the
Jews as the people of God, or the New Testament
because it contains the official record of earliest
Christianity. But if she does not mean any of these
things, what then does she mean ?
She does not mean that at any time God whispered
audibly, or within the mind of the human author
miraculously created the mental pictures or phantasms
of the words, and that the sacred writer had only to copy
out what was given to him by the Deity. It is too
obvious that these sacred writers kept their own style
and mode of expression and remained in some sense
"just themselves," though they were inspired.
4 INSPIRATION
Inspiration is some kind of unique relation in the order
of efficient causality between God and the inspired book.
Such inspiration is a supernatural fact, by its very
nature known only to God and to whomsoever He
pleases to reveal it. Hence the only judge whether a
book is inspired or not is the Catholic Church. As is
well known, she hands to her children as inspired the
books of Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus,
Baruch and the two books of the Maccabees, together
with the last seven chapters of the book of Esther, and
some chapters in the Book of Daniel. These writings
are not accounted inspired by Protestants, and are
styled by them Apocrypha. Yet they are attested as
inspired by the same authority which attests the in-
spiration of the Gospels or the Epistles of St. Paul.
If that authority erred in attesting the inspiration of
Ecclesiasticus, it may have erred in attesting the inspira-
tion of St. Mark, and the only ground on which our assent
to the inspiration of any book in the Bible rests would
be gone. Inspiration is a fact in itself not ascertainable
by unaided human reason, and depending for its pro-
clamation exclusively on revelation from God, who
alone can attest that a certain writing stands in that
imique relation to Himself.
God Himself is the author of the Book. The divine
and the human author do not share the production of
the book in the sense that one half of it is God's and the
other half man's. It is totally God's and totally man's.
God is the primary Author, using a free agent as His
instrument. They are but instrumental causes in the
hands of God.
Who these agents were, Moses, or Isaias, or Matthew,
is a matter of indifference as regards the fact of inspira-
INSPIRATION 5
tion, and in consequence not necessarily confided to the
teaching authority of the Church. In the case of some
writings she clearly professes ignorance as to who the
human authors were and lets her children freely dispute
about the human authorship. In other cases where the
authorship of a particular human being seems demanded,
either by an apparently unbroken tradition, or by reason
of the relation of the book to other Scripture texts, or
because the question of authorship is bound up with the
maintenance of certain revealed doctrines, she has
gravely warned her children not too easily to set aside
the commonly reputed author. She could, moreover,
although she has never as yet done so, define infallibly
the human authorship of certain books if she found
this implied in the deposit of the Faith. Thus she
might define the Davidic authorship of some Psalms,
because of their being quoted as such by Christ, or the
Mosaic authorship of some sections of the Pentateuch
because it is implied in our Lord's reference to Moses as
testifying to Him.
Now inspiration necessarily involves the absolute
veracity of every statement of the Bible; for as God
wrote it, and God cannot He, the Bible cannot contain
error of any kind. This complete inerrancy of Scripture
does not, however, of necessity imply that every state-
ment must be taken in a literal sense, and as true in
that literal sense.
God speaks to men in a human way, and He speaks to
them in a language representing a certain period of
human progress. He uses language commonly used
by the contemporaries of the human writer. The " sun
rises and sets," the rain " comes down from heaven."
Even in reference to historical matters He uses terms
6 INSPIRATION
and designations in currency at the time. If God
referred to the battle between William and Harold in
1066, He might call it the " Battle of Hastings,"
because that is the only term now used to designate that
particular conflict, though some people now try to show
the inaccuracy of that local designation. The Bible,
however, could not contain a definite assertion that a
certain battle took place at a certain date and locality,
if this were not really true. Any statement which is
the direct assertion of a certain fact must be true,
for God can neither deceive nor be deceived.
Furthermore, God can use any literary composition
He chooses. God could inspire a novel if He so chose.
Apparently He has not done so, but there is nothing
in the doctrine of inspiration which would preclude
the possibihty. God can inspire poetry. The Book
of Job is in metrical lines practically throughout. It is
poetry, hence we are not bound to believe that Job sat
on the dunghill and recited hundreds on hundreds of
verses, and that his friends answered him in verse too.
The Book of Job is inspired throughout, and is abso-
lutely true throughout, but it must be understood as
poetry is normally understood.
What, then, does inspiration really involve ? Here we
can only quote the passage of Leo. XIII.'s Provideniis-
simus Deus, issued in 1893, which has become classical
in its precise exposition of the results of inspiration as
far as we can understand it. Herein we learn that the
Holy Ghost "by supernatural power so moved and
impelled them [the sacred writers] to write — He was so
present to them — that the things which He ordered,
and those only, they, first, rightly understood, then
willed faithfully to write down and finally expressed
INSPIRATION 7
in apt words and with infallible truth. Otherwise it
could not be said that He was author of the entire
Scripture."
If we analyse this classical passage we find first of
all that it excludes the notion — already by implication
condemned by the Vatican Council — that a writing
could become inspired by any subsequent approbation,
adoption or guarantee of infallibility by the Holy
Ghost. The action of the Holy Ghost is antecedent
and concomitant, but not subsequent to the composi-
tion of the book. It is an impulse and a movement
not a following sanction. Then we find that it describes
the effect produced by divine action on the human
faculties, that is to say : the intelligence, the will and the
executive faculties. God first moved the will. The
initiative comes from God. He set the human will in
action by physical premotion. He moved the human
writer spontaneously and freely to write the book which
God willed to be written precisely as God willed it.
How God can move the human will without forcing it
we do not understand. It is not a question that need
detain us here. The writer was often aware of this
inspiration, oftentimes he was not. Then God illumines
the mind so that the mind correctly conceives the book
to be written. Not that God necessarily reveals any-
thing, for everything contained in the book may already
have been known, or laboriously gathered from other
informants or books ; not that God must needs throw
words or sentences as it were from outside on to the
screen of the mind, but God enhghtens the mind and,
supematurally aiding the intellect, makes it conceive,
judge, reason, as He wills, without necessarily adding
to the objects of knowledge. Finally, God so guards
8 INSPIRATION
the executive faculties, hand, eye, ear, memory, that
what the writer conceived and willed to write is written
correctly.
In consequence, God is the primary author of the book
when finished. True the style of Isaias is not the style
of Jeremias, just as a man writing with a quill produces
other script than a man who writes with a steel nib.
God used a living, free-will and an intelligent agent,
and used them exactly as they were. He could have
used other instruments, but He did not. He could
have overridden imperfections of style, but He did not.
He vidlled the book as it is. Hence, though we do not
hold verbal inspiration in the sense that the words were
directly supplied to the human author by God, never-
theless God is immediately responsible for, and acknow-
ledges as His own, the whole of the Scriptures and every
word of it, so that we cannot say either that now and
then words or sentences slipped through which were un-
inspired and merely human, or that the words are human
and only the underlying thoughts divine. The ultimate
result of inspiration is the written book, not the internal
thoughts of the writer. Least of all, of course, dare we
say that the devotional or religious parts are God's and
the matters pertaining to revelation or moraUty, but
that the historical parts are only human. As God,
then, is the author of the Bible, for the CathoHc there
never can be any question as to its truth, the only
question is as to its meaning. In discussing this meaning
CathoHc scholars have in a few cases the infalHble
decision of the Church, which has settled definitely the
meaning of a small number of texts. For the bulk,
however, they are left to the resources of scholarship
to infer the meaning from the context, from the inter-
INSPIRATION 9
pretation of antiquity, and from the light thrown upon
them by history and science. Hence, Cathohc BibUcal
scholars are untrammelled in their scientific research
work with regard to the Bible. The decisions some-
times issued by lower — not infallible — tribunals of the
Church on BibUcal matters must, indeed, be received
with internal as well as external reverence, but they
aim at producing a much-needed and rational caution
in treating such a sacred matter as the Written Word of
God. Catholic scholars of whatever eminence realise
that, official, though not final, utterances of Church
authorities, to whom the custody of the Bible is divinely
committed, are at least more likely to be true than the
findings of their own individual scholarship.
CathoHcs, then, in studying the Bible realise that they
are face to face now with poetry, now with prose, now
with primitive history but metaphorically told, now
with history proper in its minute and modern sense,
now with law, now with exhortation and prophecy ;
and all need their own rules of interpretation. Yet
inspiration is not something which ebbs and flows,
which is at its highest say in St. John or Isaias, at its
lowest in Leviticus or Judges. It is as inspiration
something absolute, a fact admitting no degrees. True
St. John, when he wrote the Prologue to his Gospel,
may have been favoured by divine revelation, whereas
the author of II. Maccabees was not. But revelation is
not inspiration, and the Fourth Gospel and II. Maccabees
are equally inspired.
But you may ask what does inspiration in the case
of II. Maccabees really come to ? It is only an abridg-
ment of the five books of Jason. Were these books
extant we might find the whole of the Bible book in
10 INSPIRATION
the larger uninspired work, with the exception perhaps
of a sentence here and there.
To this we answer it was God who wrote II. Maccabees,
using the material of Jason's book, hence God reaffirmed
his statements and made them His own by His selection
and endorsement and embodiment in His book, thus
becoming truly author of them as they stand in
II. Maccabees.
But again you may ask : may we not see in the Bible
a great number of tacit quotations, passages which are
just given for what they are worth, and therefore not
adopted by the inspired writer as his own, and thus
possibly containing many errors for which the human
authors of the sources only are responsible ? Cannot
we say that Moses or Isaias or Ezra make a quotation
while declining responsibility for its truth ?
Speaking in the abstract, this is possible, and a small
number of such quotations might possibly be found,
but we are warned by the Church not to extend this
"tacit quotation" theory beyond its true limits. Such
quotations are only to be admitted on the gravest and
clearest grounds, and in individual instances, for the
wholesale application of this theory is utterly alien to
the mind of the Church, and would completely eviscerate
the Bible of its contents and make inspiration a phantom
and a mockery. Would our concept of inspiration
allow us to acknowledge that Biblical history was only
history as it was understood in those days with all the
latitude allowed to such primitive history ? When, for
instance, speeches are put on the lips of Peter and Paul
in the Acts of the Apostles, may we regard them as we
do the speeches put into the mouth of various worthies
by Livy or Caesar, which no one believes were actually
INSPIRATION II
spoken, but just manufactured by the historian to
express what one may well guess to have been the
sentiments of the party concerned ? Speaking purely
in the abstract, this might have been conceivable, but
it is not admissible in the concrete. With regard to the
words put on the lips of Our Lord and His Apostles in
the New Testament, the Church, which hands us the
books as inspired, also hands them to us as historically
correct in detail. What sort of method a Matthew, a
John, or a Luke pursued in their own historical books is
as a matter of fact known within the Church on historic
data. With regard to the words of the Saviour Himself,
mere common sense would suggest that unless they were
truly His as they stand, and not merely the historian's
idea of what the situation demanded, they would be
valueless. Since, however, trifling variations occur in
the same speeches as recorded by different evangelists,
and since, as a matter of fact, these speeches of Our Lord
are only given in a Greek translation, not in the Aramaic
original, it is plain that inspiration did not supply as it
were shorthand reports of the words as actually spoken,
but as a veracious listener of truthful memory would
correctly render a speech which he had heard. Mistakes
in report would be irreconcilable with the veracity of
the Primary Author, i.e. God ; but imperfection, not
implying falsehood, God might of course allow. For
Catholics the speeches in the New Testament are recorded
by the Holy Ghost Himself, for He is the Primary Author
of the Sacred Books, hence inaccuracy, as far as it
impUes any element of untruth, is utterly excluded ;
but such imperfections and lack of completeness as may
arise from the imperfection of the secondary or instru-
mental cause, i.e. the human author, may be admitted.
12 INSPIRATION
Hence, for instance, the omission of the Petrine text
Tu es Petrus, etc., from St. Mark might conceivably be due
to the fact that St. Mark did not know it. Personally,
we do not think this opinion is historically tenable, but
that is on account of historical convictions, not theo-
logical prepossessions. Any inference, however, that
because the Petrine text occurs only in St. Matthew, it
is somehow of less value or certainty, is against funda-
mental CathoHc principle, for the complete weight of
divine authority is at the back of every text in St.
Matthew on account of its inspiration.
That St. Matthew or St. John should give us not strict
history, but rather the "Christ of faith" at the end of
the First Century, the Christ as conceived by the first
Christian community, not as He was in historical fact,
is formally excluded, not only by the literary form of the
Gospels, which is evidently historical in the strict sense,
and not imaginative, but is likewise directly excluded
by the common teaching of the Church throughout the
centuries, which gave these gospels to her children
as in the strictest detail historical throughout. This
common teaching or magisterium quotidianum is an
undeniable historical fact and an infalhble criterion of
truth just as much as the magisterium solemne exercised
now and then by Pope or Council. Moreover, even if we
could concede that St. Matthew or St. John gave us only
the Christ as conceived at the end of the first century,
this "Christ of faith" would still be identical with the
Christ of history, not merely because it is historically
untenable that the Christian community should have
changed the character of its Founder during the lifetime
of those who had intimately known the twelve Apostles
and Paul, but because the teaching body of the Church
INSPIRATION 13
between bo and 120 a.d. would on this supposition have
erred. Such a supposition is destructive of the funda-
mental doctrine of Catholicity, which maintains that the
Church is infallible every minute of her existence between
Pentecost and the Second Coming of Christ.
More difficult is the question of the interpretation of
the first ten chapters of Genesis — whether they may not
contain history indeed, but metaphorically told. Here
again the fact of inspiration by itself only guarantees
that they cannot contain anything at variance with the
veracity or dignity of God. For further study of their
meaning it is necessary to appeal, not to inspiration,
but to the interpretation to be gathered from the text
itself and from the teaching of the Church. The Church
decidedly rejects the idea of their being sagas, or myths,
or legends, or merely moral truths, or merely ideas
expressed in parables. The Church has ever maintained
that they are historical, though real history may be
metaphorically told. One could narrate the story of
the Great War 1 9 14- 1 918 under the symbols of a struggle
between the Lion, the Eagle, the Cock, the Bear and
the Ewe Lamb, signifying Britain, Germany, France,
Russia and Belgium. Yet such an account would be
history, not legend — real history, but metaphorically
told. Thus with regard to the creation of Man and the
Fall, the Church teaches that these things are facts,
not IDEAS clothed in story form ; but she does not insist
that the facts of God's immediate creation of Man, His
secondary creation of woman, their being placed in a
privileged supernatural condition, their temptation by
an external Evil Agent, their fall, their punishment,
may not have been clothed to some extent in symbolic
phraseology. It is possible. It is not irreconcilable
14 INSPIRATION
with the idea of inspiration. Perhaps some reader may
at this point exclaim : "Where is all this going to stop ?
Once you begin to whittle down the literal meaning the
whole historical edifice crumbles." But the Catholic
has his immediate and ready answer : "It is going to
stop the very instant the Church wants it to stop."
Her decision is absolutely final. She possesses within
herself the inexhaustible source of all the means to
defend and to further the maintenance of God's revela-
tion amongst her children, and should an answer to
these questions ever become a real need of the faithful,
she will answer them.
Meanwhile, it is not true to say that to allow the
metaphorical meaning of some passages must mean
the destruction of the whole edifice, for in his interpreta-
tion the Catholic scholar is continually guided by the
conviction that no interpretation can be right which
would reflect on the divine veracity or dignity of the
Primary Author. We are interpreting a book written
by God, and our interpretation is cautious and restrained,
because the Catholic scholar realises that one day he
shall stand before the judgment seat of that book's
Author, and He may hold it a crime if with careless ease
we have tinkered away at the book He wrote.
Moreover, Catholic scholars have not merely the
bare text itself to go by. They have to consult the
interpretation which, as a matter of fact, has been given
by the Fathers of the Church before them. If the inter-
pretations of these Fathers are given only as a matter
of their own private speculation, they are not matter
of faith, but only to be respected according to the weight
and position of them as scholars and thinkers. But if
such interpretations are given as merely handing down
INSPIRATION 15
the traditional meaning current in the Church, and if such
traditional meaning is accepted as part of the revelation
originally committed to the Church or as a necessary
deduction therefrom, then such interpretation is in-
fallibly true, and no scholar may set it aside.
Maybe no Pope or Council has ever made it a matter
of solemn definition, none the less for those who realise
that as a matter of fact such is the teaching of the
Church, it constitutes an absolutely final authority, even
before the rare solemnity of an anathema to its contra-
dictors. Thus there is no Ukelihood of CathoHc scholars
rashly abandoning the Mosaic authorship of the bulk of
the Pentateuch. First of all, they retain greater liberty
in face of the formidable array of modem non-CathoUc
scholars, who proclaim as settled acquisition of modern
learning the well-known J.E.D.P.H.R. division of the
Hexateuch. Then, furthermore, the very importance
of the matter involved and the (at least apparent)
endorsement of Mosaic authorship by the Saviour and
the very constancy of the tradition supporting it, all these
things render Catholic scholars not less but rather more
scientific in their treatment of that sacred text.
With the infallible authority of the Church behind
them CathoHc scholars possess a freedom and fearlessness
of interpretation which none but they can fully have.
Take, for instance, their study of the Six days of Crea-
tion. Some have maintained that these were long ages
of evolution, others that they were days only seen in
vision by Adam, for previous to man's creation there was
no man to witness what happened, and God only could
reveal, which He did under this s3nTibolism ; others saw
in this chapter a Psalm in which with poetical imagery
God's week's work was sung ; others agEiin saw in it a
i6 INSPIRATION
counterblast to the worship of Sun and Moon and Tiu
and Wodan and Thor and Freia and Satur, as later on
they came to be called, the gods to whom the days of
week were dedicated, that the Jews might dedicate their
week to the Creator and not to His creatures ; others,
again, a transformation of the oldest account of creation
corrupted through superstitions and polytheism.
As with the days of Creation, so with the story of the
Creation of Adam in the second chapter. If ever the
theory of evolution should cease to be the mere theory
it is now and be scientifically proven, no Catholic
bibhcal scholar will claim that of itself the bibUcal
account of man's creation makes an apphcation of
evolution to man's body impossible. The soul is the
immediate creation of God, for the Church teaches so ; the
biblical account of the origin of man's body is certainly
partially metaphorical, for God has no physical breath
to breathe into the human form He made. How far the
metaphor goes the Bible itself does not decide.
So likewise with the prodigiously long ages of the
Patriarchs. Some fact — not merely a moral or philo-
sophical idea — underlies them. Above all they are not
merely childish folklore to fill up gaps of unknown
history. But what that fact is the Church has never
authoritatively settled. At present we seem to have
lost the key to those enormous numbers, perhaps we
are on the eve of rediscovering their meaning through
the finding of the hsts of the Babylonian or Sumerian
antediluvian Patriarchs corresponding not in sound, but
in meaning apparently to the biblical names. If once
we could ascertain what they conveyed to Abraham and
his tribe, who came from Ur in the Chaldees, we would
have solved the riddle.
INSPIRATION 17
Thus Catholic scholarship will go on with utmost
freedom, yet in utmost security, ever venturing farther
out into the ocean because never severed from the Rock
on which Christ built His Church, ever forward, yet in
utmost safety, for the Infallible Interpreter of the Bible
is always on the alert and living and teaching in the
bark of Peter.
II.
THE MOSAIC LAW
By the Rev. T. E. Bird, D.D.
A SURE landmark in the history of Israel is the erection
and dedication of Solomon's Temple. A sure landmark,
for whereas the historical existence of things — such as
the Ark of the Berith and the Tabernacle in the wilder-
ness — and of personages — such as the Patriarchs and
Aaron (in the so-called J. document) — has been ques-
tioned or denied by some modern writers, no one, as
far as I am aware, has as yet disputed the historical fact
that towards the close of the eleventh or the opening
of the tenth century B.C. a Temple was built at Jerusalem.
This event, therefore, serves as a landmark recognised
by aU.
Now the construction of this national Temple — for
such it was, and not merely a local place of worship —
was not an undertaking that aroused little attention.
On the contrary, the whole nation was astir. The
manhood of Israel was conscribed and sent in drafts of
thousands — some to fell and prepare timber, others
to hew out stone from the quarries, others to effect the
transport. The expenses were enormous. There was a
determination that this Temple of Yahwe should "show
greatness exceedingly of fame and glory throughout all
lands" (i Par. xxii. 5).^ If the figures in our present
* I. and II. Paralipomenon of the Vulgate and Douay Versions
are named I. and II. Chronicles in the Anghcan Versions. So
our I. and II. Kings are I. and II. Samuel in the Authorized and
Revised Versions.
THE MOSAIC LAW 19
text are original, a sum exceeding £1,000,000,000 was
devoted to the enterprise. Seven and a half years of
activity were spent before the day of Dedication came
and presented a magnificent spectacle before the eyes
of the worshippers.
But the Temple was not built simply for display. Its
main purpose was otherwise. It was the House of God,
the Sanctuary where worship, liturgy, and sacrifice were
to be performed to the honour of the one God of Israel.
Incidentally, it was not a Pantheon.
Now the features of the Temple reveal that its project
was not an altogether new venture or creation, but that
it was the result of a development. Within the limits
of this paper we can but touch a few of these features.
We will notice, however, that the Temple was the
Beth Yahwe — the House of the God of Israel ; that it
contained certain furniture ; that it was served by an
organised priesthood ; that sacrifices were offered there.
All this indicates development. Thus Solomon's
Temple was not the first Beth Yahwe. It took the
place of the humbler Beth Yahwe on Sion where David
worshipped (2 Kings xii. 20), which, in its turn, had
superseded the Beth Yahwe at Shilo (i Kings iii. 15, i. 7 ;
Judges xviii. 31). Thus we are taken back to the time
of the Conquest ; and so are not surprised to find
regulations concerning the Beth Yahwe in the earliest
and latest parts of the Pentateuchal legislation (Exod.
xxiii. 19, xxxiv. 26 ; Deut. xxiii. 18). The conclusion
seems to be that the founder of the Beth Yahwe was
Moses, who, by tradition, was the Father of Israel's
nationality, its Apostle, and its Lawgiver. And this
conclusion is confirmed by the fact that in plan the
Beth Yahwe built by Solomon was a rephca of the
20 THE MOSAIC LAW
Tabernacle, which, even before it was set up at Shilo (Jos.
xviii. I ; i Kings ii. 22 ; the "mishkam" in 2 Kings
vii. 6 ; Ps. Ixxvii. 60), had served as the place for public
worship in the centre of the camp when Israel was an
army in the peninsula of Sinai.^ (Exod. xxvi.,
xxvii., XXX., xxxi., xxxv.-xl.).
Among the furniture in Solomon's Temple were the ark
of the Covenant, the "loaves of proposition," and the
Altar of burnt-offering. None of these were really new.
To discover their origins we have to examine the earlier
history of Israel. The Ark has a prominent place in that
history until we get back to the directions for its con-
struction in the Mosaic Law. The "loaves of proposi-
tion" were in the Tabernacle during the reign of Saul.
David came to Nob where there was a whole com-
munity of priests and a chief-priest serving the Taber-
nacle and observing liturgical regulations, and there he
received the " loaves of proposition " as Our Lord recalled
(i Kings xxi., xxii ; Matt. xii. 3, 4). If we look for the
origin of these loaves and the Table on which they were
kept we find it in the Mosaic Law (Exod. xxv. 23-30,
XXXV. 13, xxxix. 35, etc.). The Altar of burnt-offering
in Solomon's Temple was of brass (3 Kings viii. 64 ;
2 Par. vii. 7). It was not the first of its kind. It took
the place of the horned altar at which both Adonias
and Joab sought asylum (3 Kings i. 50, ii. 28). Again
we are taken back to the Law of Moses ; for there is the
first appearance of an altar of burnt-offering — made
from the acacia wood so common in the Sinai peninsula,
* This Tabernacle or sacred Tent is not to be confused with
the Tent which Moses " used to take and pitch for himself out-
side the camp," and which had Josue for its attendant (Exod.
xxxiii. 7-1 1). This latter tent was Moses' own private oratory,
where also he heard cases of dispute.
THE MOSAIC LAW 21
and overlaid with brass, and with horns at its corners
(Exod. xxvii., xxxviii.).
An organised priesthood served the Temple of
Solomon. If the Hebrew text is reliable in 3 Kings
viii. 4, both priests and Levites took part in the Dedica-
tion ceremony, as is stated also in 2 Par. v. Now no one
supposes that Solomon founded the Hebrew priesthood.
During his father David's reign Sadoc and Abiathar are
priests; and "all the Levites" are mentioned in 2 Kings
XV. 24. Above we referred to the community of priests
at Nob during the days of Saul. Earlier still the
Levites are seen attending the Ark (i Kings vi. 15) ;
and a priesthood was ofhciating at Shilo before the birth
of Samuel (i Kings i.). At that time the priesthood was
corrupt. Now a priesthood is not corrupted in its
infancy. When, then, was the Hebrew priesthood
instituted ? In Patriarchal times it did not exist ; at
the time of the Judges it had lost its sense of responsi-
bility. There seems but one solution — the Hebrew
priesthood was established by Moses. That is also the
answer from the records and tradition. Those that
reject it naturally find, with M. Loisy, that " the origins
of the Levitical priesthood are not wanting in obscur-
ity."i
Finally, what were the sacrifices offered in Solomon's
Temple ? Now instead of answering this question from
the sacred records — for the critical school labels " Inter-
polation," "addition," "redaction," "gloss," passages
therein that do not fit hypotheses — we will answer it
from an extraneous source. The Elephantine Papyri,
brought to light 1898-1908, have shown that a Jewish
colony in Egypt had built there before 525 B.C. a Temple
^ Religion 0/ Israel, Eng. trans., p. 124.
22 THE MOSAIC LAW
for the worship of Yah we (Yaho). This Temple was
evidently built in order that the cult practised at the
Temple of Solomon might be reproduced in the Jewish
colony. How long these Jews had settled in Egj^t
before they began to build their Temple cannot be
determined exactly ; but we are safe in saying that the
colony already existed in 586 B.C. The sacrificial
worship, then, established at Elephantine would be
modelled on that which the first colonists had witnessed
at the Temple of Solomon before their emigration.
What, then, was the sacrificial worship at Elephantine ?
It was that of the Mosaic Law — and that part of the Law
to which criticism has given the name of "Priests'
Code." There is not space here to illustrate this point,
but neither is there need to do so, since the fact has been
demonstrated sufficiently by Canon A. van Hoonacker,
of the University of Louvain.^
Just, then, as all roads lead to Rome, so all things
connected with Solomon's Temple point back to the
Mosaic Law. Take away the Law, and the raison d'etre
of these institutions is lost.
But this is where the difficulty arises, for modern
criticism does take away the Law. It teaches that when
the great Temple was dedicated with glory and solemnity,
what certainly did not then exist, what those priests did
not yet possess, were the sacred rolls of the Mosaic Law.
Briefly, the Pentateuch was not yet written. The
portion of the Law that treats of what we have con-
sidered above — Tabernacle, Ark, Loaves of Proposition,
Altar of burnt-offering, priesthood, sacrificial worship
such as at Elephantine — and much more besides, was
not composed until some four or five centuries after the
^ UneCommunaute Judeo-Arameene. Schweich Lectures, 1914.
THE MOSAIC LAW 23
Dedication of Solomon's Temple. Its author was a
priest (or priests), who wrote at the close of or after the
Babylonian Exile. Much that he describes is the
product of religious idealism that developed during that
Exile, and never had real existence. Thus the elaborate
Tabernacle in the midst of the camp is the creation of
imagination : the description of the making of the Ark
at least is invention : the x\aronic hierachy was first
conceived at Babylon — before the Exile it never existed :
the liturgy attributed to Moses was really composed for
the Second Temple — and so on.
Now the fundamental difference between the critical
and traditional schools seems to be on the question of
development. If with the critics one supposes that
Israel coming out of Egypt was an ilhterate horde with
primitive and savage ideas, it will follow that the
Mosaic Law must have been written centuries after the
Exodus. But all turns on whether this supposition is
correct. It seems to be far from the truth. The facts
are as follows : — The rock out of which Israel was hewn
was Babylon. From there came Abram, the ancestor
of the Tribes. At that time the Babylonians were far
from being a primitive people ; on the contrary, their
civilisation was much developed. It was the age when
the Code of Hammurabi (to which the earlier part of the
Mosaic legislation bears striking resemblance) was
promulgated. Now the grandson of Abram and his sons
eventually settled in Egypt. There they mixed, not
with a primitive tribe, but with a people highly educated.
For some years the Hebrews were a privileged class in
this civilisation. True it is that, later, fortune turned
against them and they were employed as slaves ; but
this could not reduce them to primitive status. Round
24 THE MOSAIC LAW
them in Egypt they saw an elaborate rehgion with an
organised and hereditary priesthood and sacred books ;
they would notice the regulations connected with this
priesthood — linen garments, abstinence from wine,
shaving of the hair (cp. Exod. xxviii. 39-42 ; Lev. x. 9 ;
Num. viii. 7, etc.), etc. ; they could learn the weaving
of fine cloths and the making of dyes ; on every side
they saw the lavish use of gold.^ The ritual could not
fail to strike them because of its prominence. No
wonder that " the method of killing and offering animals,
the burning of incense (upon bronze censers of ladle
form), the ablutions, and many other ritualistic details
(among the Egyptians) were similar to those practised
among the Israelites" (W. Max Miiller in Encycl.
Biblica, col. 1219. Italics mine). Now to all this
must be added the education of Moses in all the wisdom
of the Egjrptians. This would include a knowledge of
Babylonian. The Tel-el- Amama tablets show that
cuneiform was learnt by Egyptian scribes before the
Exodus. Philo tells us that Moses studied the learning
of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Nothing is
more likely than that a man of Babylonian stock should
study the culture of his race when opportunit}^ was given.
We may include in Moses' education a knowledge of the
legal systems of Babylonia and Egypt. In the latter
country even from 2000 B.C. there existed the institution
of a jury appointed from among the priests and officers to
sit in judgment daily.
All this goes to prove that at the time of the Exodus
the Israelites were not barbarians, but had reached a
^ Rameses II. received from his mines gold and silver annually
to the value of ;^8o,ooo,ooo. One of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets
(No. 8) gives a letter wherein it is said that in Egypt (circa. 1500
B.C.) " gold is as common as dust."
THE MOSAIC LAW 25
high stage of development. It also becomes a fyriori
highly improbable that when he became leader of his
nation, Moses did not draw up laws founded on Baby-
lonian and Egyptian models.
There is something more. The legal portions of the
Pentateuch are — as we should expect — stamped in-
delibly with the impression of the desert. Often they
treat of the "camp" or "tents." The Ark and Taber-
nacle form a portable, not a fixed sanctuary. The
office of Levite is especially with regard to the transport
of the sacred furniture. Further, it is this "Priests'
Code" that promulgates regulations for the sanitation
of the army on the march (Lev. i. 16, iv. 12, xi. 32, 33, 39,
xiii. 46 ; Num. xix. 14, 15, xxxi. 19, etc.). It becomes
almost impossible even to imagine that a priest in the
seclusion of exile should have made these enactments.
It is almost as difficult to suppose that the leader of the
army in the peninsula of Sinai did not make so necessary
regulations. I know that, especially since the discovery
of the Elephantine Papyri, it is becoming the fashion to
say that the Priests' Code may contain some traditional
matter. But if concession along this line is to continue,
the Development or Evolutionary Hypothesis will soon
lose its meaning.
There are other parts of the Priests' Code which seem
to defy an Exilic or post-Exilic date, e.g. the catalogues
of names (Gen. xlvi., Exod. vi.. Num. ii.), the details
connected with the Manna (Exod. xvi. 14), or the second
pasch (Num. ix. 6), or the case of the daughters of Sal-
phaad (Num. xxvii., xxxvi.). This last supposes a
differentiation of the twelve tribes. Where was this
after the Exile ?
Space forbids us further consideration of the "Priests'
26 THE MOSAIC LAW
Code." Grant its critical date, and besides other
inconveniences, the institutional religion of Israel seems
to be without basis and inexplicable. Its traditional
date explains these institutions, explains Solomon's
Temple and the cult at Elephantine, explains its Baby-
lonian-Egyptian elements. Further, this traditional
date sweeps away a whole army of redactors who other-
wise invade the Old Testament, heals numerous passages
mutilated by criticism, restores some of the Psalms to
their normal pre-exilic position, makes no demand for
mental strain in the interpretation of such passages as,
for example, Amos iv. 4, 5 ; v. 21-23, and finally places
Deuteronomy — which in parts supposes the so-called P
— in its natural position.
Concerning the date of Deuteronomy, or the so-called
D, we will say a word later. Here a passing reference
may be made to two other documents demanded by
modern criticism — the so-called J and E. Which of
these has priority, and when exactly they were written,
are questions which are not answered with unanimity.
The terminus ad quern is generally c. 750 B.C., and the
terminus a quo is later than the building of Solomon's
Temple.^ The chief criterium for distinguishing between
the two documents is the use of the divine Names.
J employs the Name Yahwe (or Jahwe) — hence he is the
Jehovist writer ; E uses 'Elohim — hence he is the Elohist.
Now take away this criterium and I venture to say that
scholars, as e.g. the late Professor Driver, would not
cling with any tenacity to the separation of these two
documents ; for the other criteria are too weak and
subjective to endure alone. Can, therefore, the criterium
1 Recently, however, Konig has brought E into the time of the
Judges.
THE MOSAIC ^LAW 27
of divine Names be allowed to stand ? It cannot. An
examination of other parts of the Old Testament,
especially the Psalter, shows that the distribution of
these Names is editorial — not original. This is very
clear in the case of the duplicate psalms. Thus
Pss. xiii. (14), lii. (53) had one author, but two editors ;
and the second editor changed the divine Name through-
out the Psalm. Professor Driver states: "For such a
variation (of divine Name in Genesis) no plausible
explanation can be assigned except diversity of author-
ship."^ But if this reasoning was correct it would
follow a pari that Pss. xiii., lii. had two authors — which
no one can admit. Notice, also, how the Name Yahwe
is excluded from the speech of the unworthy. Thus
in Ps. iii. Yahwe occurs throughout, ^ except on the lips
of the Psalmist's wicked enemies (v. 2). We see the
same exclusion in the conversation between Joseph
while in disguise and his brethren, and in the speech of
the Egyptians (Gen. xl.-xliv.). But the most interesting
example is in Gen. iii. In the conversation between
Eve and the Serpent only the one Name 'Elohim is
used ; yet in the whole context we have a combination,
Yahwe- 'Elohim. Now one of the Names in this combi-
nation is an addition of an editor, as critics rightly
declare. Which is the addition ? Evidently "Yahwe"
— which the editor refrained from putting in the conver-
sation (Gen. iii. 2-7). Indeed, it would seem that this
editorial manipulation of the Names was not completed
before the Septuagint was written. At any rate the
Septuagintal text has often the one Name 'Elohim,
* Intro, to Literature cf Old Testament, edit. 9, p. 13.
* In V. 7 Elohim is employed to make parallelism, and it is with
a suffix.
28 THE MOSAIC LAW
where the Massoretic text has the combination. Thus
internal and external evidence points to " Yahwe" as an
addition in the early chapters of Genesis. Yet the
critics insist on retaining this Name as original, and
rejecting 'Elohim. The only possible explanation for
their obstinacy on this point would seem to be prejudice
in favour of Astruc's "clue," which wa^ adopted by the
"pioneers of criticism." In brief, however, the distri-
bution of the Names is editorial — Rabbinical, if you
wish — but not original. It is time we heard no more of
"Jeho\dst" and "Elohist."
From all this it does not follow that the Pentateuch
is altogether the work of Moses, much less that the whole
Law was published on one day. On the contrary, at
least six sets of laws can be found in the legislation which
extended through the Ufe-time of Moses. Outside the
legal sections other documents can be recognised. Thus
not much scholarship is required to detect that the hand
that wrote the Prologue to Genesis (i.-ii. 3) is the hand
of the jurist who wrote the Pentateuchal law. After
the Prologue the author begins his chapter i. with a
document distinctly Babylonian, and not in his style.
Who \\Tote this Babylonian document (Gen. ii. 4-iii.) ?
In Gen. xiii. 10 some one describes the Jordan basin
known as the Kikkar before the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrha ; it was "watered throughout like the
garden of the Lord, Hke the land of Egypt as one comes
to Soar." This writer knew the description of the
Garden of Eden (Gen. ii. 10-14) ; he knew also the
Kikkar before the catastrophe there ; and he had been
down to Egypt. It would seem that this person was no
other than the Bab^donian Abram. To him we would
attribute Gen. ii. 4-iii., and much of the matter contained
THE MOSAIC LAW 29
in the so-called J and E sections in the first half of
Genesis.
Perhaps enough has now been said to show how wisely
the Church acted, when through the Bibhcal Commission
(27th June, 1906) she warned her children that the
critical arguments for a post-Mosaic date of the Penta-
teuch did not outweigh the traditional teaching. ^
Before we consider the teaching of the Law, a word
may be said concerning its operation after the Conquest.
Students sometimes feel a difficulty in the fact that the
histony' of Israel after the settlement in Chanaan is not
as coloured by the Mosaic Law as one would expect.
We wiU therefore enumerate some of the circumstances
that told against the operation of the Law.
The first blow was the collapse of the central authority.
Even when Israel was a unit in the peninsula of Sinai,
and under the control of an efficient leader, there were
repeated relapses from the standard of the Law ; but
when that leader was dead and the unit split up — each
tribe fighting for its separate settlement — then that
happened which has so often happened in histor\^ when
there has been a break from central authority — the
operation of the law weakened. So the period of the
"Judges" is well summed up by the remark of its
^ The replies of the Bibhcal Commission are not acts of the
Sovereign Pontiff, it is true. They are approved not " in forma
specifica " but " in forma communi." They remain, therefore,
acts of the Commission. Nevertheless, they call for loyal recep-
tion under penalty of disobedience and the note of^ temerity
(" Praestantia Scripturae," i8th Nov., 1907). The history of
the Bibhcal criticism of the last thirty years now shows that
much of the " progress of modem thought " ended in blind alleys.
Unfortunately, often before the cul-de-sac has come in sight,
cast-off remnants of behef have been strewn on the road. The
lessons from the past call for a disposition in Bibhcal study
" sentiendi cum Ecclesia."
30 THE MOSAIC LAW
historian : " In those days there was not a king in Israel :
each man did what was right in his own eyes"
(xvii. 6, cp. xviii. 31). When at last some authority
was re-established we find a return to order and the
project of the Temple. Unfortunately, however, it was
not long before the question of Church and State arose.
Solomon began his reign with an attack on the priesthood
(3 Kings ii. 26, seq.), and he closed it as supreme head
on earth of the religion of Israel. For the future in Juda
up to the time of the Exile, the execution of the Law was
at the whim of the reigning monarch. And, unfortu-
nately, most of the kings preferred pagan licentiousness
to Mosaic severity. In Israel, after the schism, solely
for a political reason, viz., to prevent reunion of north
and south, Jeroboam forbad his subjects to go to the
central sanctuary ; set up golden calves for adoration
and sacrifice ; instituted a priesthood unconnected with
the sons of Levi ; estabhshed festivals distinct from
those in Juda, and had his own altar of incense (3 Kings
xii. 25-33). On the other hand virtuous kings like
Josaphat, Ezechias, and Josias made attempts to restore
the Law of Moses. And here we may say our promised
word on the so-called D document. The first draft, or
kernel of the book of Deuteronomy was, say the critics,
the book of the Law discovered during the repairs of the
Temple in 621 B.C. (4 Kings xxii ; 2 Par. xxxiv.). But
this book had no connection with Moses ; in fact it was
written shortly before its "discovery." Why this?
Briefly, because the regulations of D were unknown
before the time of Josias, and his reformation first
introduced them. Now is this true ? Josias himself
says that the regulations were known to "our fathers,"
but were not enforced. Now leaving aside the much
THE MOSAIC LAW 31
abused Chronicler, let us look at the reformation in
4 Kings xxiii. We read that Josias destroyed the
vessels used in idolatrous worship, abolished the high-
places and the burning of incense there, ground to
powder the Ashera, broke down the obelisks, etc. Now
if we go back a hundred years we find that Ezechias also
reformed religion. He abolished the high-places, broke
down the obeHsks, cut down the Ashera, and stopped the
idolatrous burning of incense. In other words, "he
kept the commandments which Yahwe had com-
manded Moses" (4 Kings xviii. 4, 7). Surely if Josias'
reformation was based on Deuteronomy, so was that of
Ezechias.^
To return. The chief obstacle against the operation
of the Mosaic Law was the disappearance, for some two
centuries, of central authority ; which, when restored,
was religious or irreligious according to the personal
character of the ruler of the State.
The second adverse circumstance was the milieu in
which the separated tribes found themselves after the
Conquest. No longer were they nomads, but dwellers
in walled cities. About them stood pagan altars associ-
^ Hence this reformation under Ezechias is a sore point with
the supporters of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, and leads
them into statements that make bad criticism. Thus the Rev.
F. H. Woods in his article on " Hexateuch " in Hastings' Diction-
ary of the Bible (II. 368), tries to evade the difficulty by the
remark : " It is clear that the attempt of Hezekiah, 2 Kings xviii. 4,
to put down high-places was only partial or tentative." But this
is by no means clear, in fact the text, read with the address of
Rabsaces, 4 Kings xviii. 22, and the statement that Manasses
" built again the high-places which Ezechias his father had
destroyed," 4 Kings xxi. 3, rather indicates that the reverse is
" clear." To an evasion of this kind we prefer the bold declara-
tion of critics Uke Cheyne and Moore, who " cannot venture
to take 4 Kings xviii. 4 as strictly historical." (See e.g. Enc. Biblica,
col. 2058, 2068.) But of course, this is not the genuine historical
method.
32 THE MOSAIC LAW
ated with attractive immorality. Moses had foreseen
this, and, that monotheism might be preserved, had
commanded the extermination of the Chanaanite tribes :
"lest they teach you to do all the abominations which
they have done to their gods, and you should sin against
Yahwe your God" (Deut. xx. i8). But this extermi-
nation was not so easy as might have been thought,
and, as the history records, the injunction full often
became a dead letter (Josue xv. 63, xvi. 10, xvii. 13,
etc.). It was not long, therefore, before Mosaic ordin-
ances were unpopular, and idolatrous cult in vogue. ^
A third extrinsic cause that told against the operation
of the Law was human nature. It is hard enough for
many persons nowadays to keep the ten commandments ;
It was harder for Israel to observe not only the Decalogue
but much more besides in the polytheistic world of that
time. Critical arguments are often made from the non-
observance of the Law in the post-Conquest history to
its non-existence at the time of Moses. This is as
precarious as the argumentum e silentio. A study of
Canon Law makes one cautious on this line of argument. ^
* So the Psalmist sings sorrowfully : —
" And He brought them to His holy border ;
A mountain-land, that His right hand had acquired,
And he drove out nations before them.
But they tempted, yea, they provoked God Most High ;
And kept not His testimonies ;
But turned back, and were faithless like their fathers :
They recoiled like a treacherous bow.
And they roused Him to anger by their high-places
And provoked His jealousy by their images."
Ps. Ixxvii. 54-58.
2 One quarter of the Codex Juris Canonici is concerned • — " De
Processibus," a branch of Canon Law up to the present almost
unknown among CathoUcs in some English-speaking countries.
THE MOSAIC LAW 33
Finally, there were intrinsic difficulties. Many of
the statutes dealt with camp or nomadic Ufe, and became
unreal once the wanderings came to an end. Some of
the enactments had been revised or modified, and
existed in more than one form in the Tora. The slave-
laws in part had regarded Hebrews serving for debt ;
after the Conquest Chanaanite slaves took their place.
The porterage of the sacred furniture was no longer
required ; and the Levites found themselves without a
well-defined status. These were only some of the
intrinsic difficulties.
Yet in spite of all obstacles the Law was not altogether
forgotten. Apart from relapses, the religion of the
Hebrews between the Conquest and the Exile was not
the rehgion of the Patriarchs (cp. Deut. v. 3) ; it was
not the religion of Egypt ; it was not the religion of the
Chanaanites ; it was the religion of the Mosaic Law —
especially that of the so-called "Priests' Code." If
the operation was weak, there were exceptional circum-
stances to make it so ; and its subjects were those to
whom Our Lord had to say : "Did not Moses give you
the Law ? And yet none of you keep the Law " (John
vii. 19).
We come now to the last part of this paper — the
Religion of the Law. Space allows a consideration only
of its salient features ; the most outstanding of which
was sublime monotheism.
Above all the corruption of a world sunk into idolatry,
there sounded forth from Israel : Credo in unum Deum.
"Hear, O Israel : the Lord our God is One God" (Deut.
vi. 4). And this creed was from the first guarded by
the death penalty : "He that sacrificeth to any god, save
the Lord only, shall be 'devoted'" (Exod. xxii. 20).
34 THE^ MOSAIC LAW
It was this belief that again and again saved Israel
during the course of her backshding progress, which is
spoken of as "evolution."
And the Credo continued : Patrem Omnipotentum,
factor em coeli et terrae, visibilium et invisibilium. Because
He was the Creator of everything, everything belonged
to Him — the fruits of the earth, of the flocks and herds
nay, even man. "They are all Mine" summed it up
(Exod. xiii. 2). And man should recognise that they
all were His. How could this be shown ? By offering
to Him the first-fruits of the ground, the first-born of
beasts and of men. But the first male could be bought
back or redeemed. How ? By the offering of a substi-
tute or victim. Offerings to God were "sacrifices,"
which, when performed as public acts, demanded ritual,
liturgy, and a priesthood. Even one day of the week
belonged especially, and was consecrated to Him.^ One
day in the year was to be a Fast-day that the soul that
had sinned against Him might be "afflicted" and
"cleansed from sins" (Lev. xvi. 29-31, xxiii. 27-32 ;
Num. xxix. 7). What we should call "Holidays of
Obhgation" were also commanded. These were especi-
ally in connection with the three great annual Festivals,
to which all male IsraeHtes were summoned. First-
fruits, Tabernacles, and Passover. To the last men-
tioned was united the observance of Unleavened Bread. ^
This Feast was first instituted as a domestic celebration
(Exod. xii.), but in the legislation that considered the
^ To impress the Sabbath institution on the minds of the
Israehtes, the work of Creation was represented in an artificial
framework of a week — the seventh day of which was sancified
(Gen. i-ii. 3; Exod. xx. 9-11 ; xxiii. 12; xxxi. 12-17; Deut.
V. 12-15).
* Exod. xii; xiii. 3-10; xxiii. 15: xxxiv. 18; Lev. xxiii.
4-14 ; Num. ix. 1-14 ; xxviii. 16-25.
THE MOSAIC LAW 35
settlement in Chanaan it was forbidden to be celebrated
except "at the place which Yahw^ shall choose" (Deut.
xvi. 1-8). Hence the abuse prevalent among the
priests of the high-places, and the reform by Josias
(4 Kings xxiii. 9, 21-23). Hence also the disfavour of
Jerusalem towards Elephantine — for there, on pagan
soil, was celebrated the Passover (Sachau, p. 36).
But besides its Dogma and Liturgy, the Law had its
moral theology. God was to be served and feared —
not with dread, but with reverence and love. In the
earliest teaching (Exod. xx. 6) He is represented as
"showing mercy ... to them that love Me and keep
My commandments " ; and in the final legislation is the
precept : "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy
whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy
whole strength." 1 After this follows the command in
Lev. xix. 18 : "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy-
self." Thus the two greatest precepts of both Old and
New Testament are written in the Law. There we
first find the vinculum perfectionis. Nay, there was the
further command that one must do good to one's private
enemies, and seek no revenge (Exod. xxiii. 4, 5 ; Lev.
xix. 17, 18). Finally there was the Decalogue, which,
in spite of all the supposed evolution of the human mind,
remains even to this day the basis of morality, and
challenges any substitute.
But Israel was not solely a religious community ; it
was also a civil society. Its political nature, however,
was peculiar, for it was a Theocracy. Hence not only its
religious, but also its civil enactments were referred to
God. Distinct therefore from its religious teaching was
its penal legislation dealing with human nature offending
1 See also Deut. xi. 13 ; x. 12, etc.
36 THE MOSAIC LAW
against civil law and order. Hence the so-called lex
talionis (Exod. xxi. 24 ; Lev. xxiv. 20 ; Deut. xix. 21)
which remained a theocratic law, until Christ said :
"My kingdom is not of this world." This civil law also
protected the rights of private ownership ; but not in
the sense that some modern economists understand
proprietorship (Deut. xxiii. 24, 25). Unlike the Baby-
lonian criminal code, there was in the Mosaic legislation
but one law for both rich and poor alike.
So much by way of summary. There is, however, one
other enactment in Hebrew Law which does not seem
to have been given the attention it deserves. We refer
to the Blood Prohibition. A short consideration of it
will close our paper. We all know that the pious Jew
to-day will eat only kosher meat — meat from which the
blood has been completely drained. In other words it is
forbidden to "eat blood." There was trouble in the
early Church with the Jewish converts over this matter
(cp. Acts XV. 20). Back in the time of Saul, the people
"sinned against the Lord" in that they ate the blood
of beasts after the defeat of the PhiUstines (i Kings
xiv. 32-34).
We cannot here inquire into the full reason of this
prohibition. Originally it seems to have been directed
against manslaughter. Adam's first-born was a murderer,
and he was cursed. The few survivors from the Flood,
who were to re-people the earth, were blessed ; but at
the same time the prohibition was formulated : —
"Flesh with (its soul — ) its blood, you shall not eat,^
And indeed, I will require your blood of your souls :
1 The words in brackets are not in the Vulgate, and the text
makes simpler reading without them. The Hebrew word may
be an explanatory gloss. However, the Vulgate alone omits.
THE MOSAIC LAW 37
From the hand of every beast will I require it,^
And from the hand of man.
From the hand of each man's brother
I will require the soul of man.
Whosoever shall shed man's blood,
By man his blood shall be shed :
For in the image of God, I made (LXX) man."
Gen. ix. 4-6.
With the blood was associated the life (or soul). As
a man lost blood, so his life oozed out. But as the life —
even of a beast — belonged to God, so the blood of every
animal slaughtered whether in sacrifice or not, was to
be poured out. Hence the law (Lev. vii. 26, 27) : —
" You shall eat no blood whatsoever —
Any soul that eateth any blood, that soul shall be
cut off from the people."
But later the people offered idolatrous sacrifices and
disregarded the blood prohibition. This led to the
stringent law (Lev. xvii. 3 sqq.) : —
"Any man whosoever of the house of Israel that
killeth an ox, or a lamb, or a goat, in the camp, or
without the camp, and bringeth it not unto the door
of the Tent — shall be guilty of blood. He hath shed
blood : and that man shall be cut off from the midst
of the people — And the priest shall sprinkle the blood
upon the altar — And they shall no more sacrifice their
victims to demons, with whom they have committed
fornication — If any man whosoever of the house of
Israel or of the strangers that sojourn among them eat
any blood, / will set my face against that soul that
eateth blood, and will cut him off from the midst of the
Cp. Exodus xxi 28.
38 THE MOSAIC LAW
people. For the soul of the flesh is in the blood ; and
I have given it to you upon the altar to make atone-
ment for your souls : for it is the blood that maketh
atonement by reason of the soul. Therefore — no soul
of you shall eat blood ; and the stranger that sojourneth
among you shall not eat blood. If any man whosoever
— hunting or fowling — let him pour out its blood, and
cover it with dust," etc.^
The law, therefore, enacted that all slaughter — except
that occasioned by hunting or fowling — should be done
at the central sanctuary. But this would be impossible
when the tribes were settled in Chanaan. Foreseeing
the difficulty Moses allows the slaughter of animals in
any town ; but the blood prohibition is again insisted
upon. Deut. xii. gives this final legislation : —
''These are the statutes and the judgments which
you shall observe to do in the land. — Unto the place
which Yahwe your God shall choose — thou shalt
come ; and thither shall you bring your burnt-
offerings and your sacrifices — Beware lest thou offer
thy burnt- offerings in every place that thou seest —
Nevertheless at any inclination of thine appetite thou
mayest kill, and eat flesh (according to the blessing
of Yahwe thy God which he hath given thee) within
all thy gates. — Only you shall not eat the blood : thou
shalt pour it out upon the earth as water — Only be
firm not to eat the blood : for the blood is the soul ; and
thou mayest not eat the soul with the flesh. Thou
shalt not eat it : thou shalt pour it out upon the earth
as water. Thou shalt not eat it, that it may be well
with thee — The blood of thy sacrifices shall be poured
^ See also Lev. xix. 26
THE MOSAIC LAW 39
out upon the altar of Yahwe thy God ; and the flesh
thou shalt eat."^
Again the law is insisted upon (Deut. xv. 23) : —
"Only thou shalt not eat its blood : thou shalt pour
it out upon the earth as water."
Because the soul was connected with the blood, the
blood was not to be eaten. But for the same reason
blood could expiate from sin.^ For sin a man deserved
death. To atone he ought to give his life. But as this
was not allowed, he gave instead a "victim" — a substi-
tute for his life, viz., the life, i.e. the blood of an animal.
The importance of the teaching of the Law on Blood
can hardly be exaggerated ; for it is here precisely where
the New Law brought the Old to fulfilment. Christ
becoming "sin for us" made atonement by giving His
life in bloody sacrifice on the Cross. Indeed, without
this shedding of blood the expiation would not have been
obtained (2 Cor. v. 15-21 ; Heb. ix. 22). But once this
Sacrifice was made on Calvary, the sacrifices of the Old
Law — "Shadows of the good things to come" — ceased
to have effect (Heb. x. 1-20).
There was another change — the Blood Prohibition
1 The critics, of course, date Deut. xii. before Lev. xvii. (mainly
H), and in both chapters they see propaganda for the central-
ization of the place of sacrifice, i.e. the abohtion of " high-
places " and the recognition of the Temple at Jerusalem as the
one Sanctuar>'. But— especially in the case of Lev. xvii.--
Jewish propaganda was not presented under so thick a veil.
Witness e.g. the Book of Jubilees. Surely, at least in Lev. xvii.
the place of slaughter is secondary to the prime object of the
legislation, viz., the Blood Prohibition.
2 Lev. xvi 15, 16, 19 ; xvii. 11 : Heb. ix., x. Since the above,
was -v^Titten there has appeared in the current number of
Biblica (Vol. II., pp. 141-169) a valuable article • " Le Symbol-
isme du Sacrifice Expiatoire en Israel," by Dr. Mederbielle.
It is to be concluded in the next number (July, 1921).
40 THE MOSAIC LAW
was reversed. The life is in the blood : hence to have
the life of Christ within us it is necessary to drink His
sacred Blood : —
"Amen, amen, I say unto you : Except you eat the
flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you shall
not have life in you. He that eateth My flesh and
drinketh My blood hath everlasting life ; and I will
raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is meat
indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He that eateth
My flesh and drinketh My blood abideth in Me, and I in
him. As the living Father hath sent Me and I live by
the Father ; so he that eateth Me, the same also shaU
live by Me" (John vi. 54-58).
No wonder the Jews with the blood prohibition among
their deepest convictions "strove one with another,
saying : 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat ? ' "
(John vi. 53). No wonder many, even of the disciples,
said : "This is a hard saying ; and who can hear it"
(vi. 61). We can even understand how after the further
explanation that it was not a dead body that they would
eat, but the living Christ ascended to the Father, still
"many of His disciples went back and walked no more
with Him" (vi. 67). But the twelve that remained were
privileged to witness the abolition of the blood prohibi-
tion and the institution of the great Sacrament : " Drink
ye cdl of this : for this is My blood of the (New) Testa-
ment."
III.
THE PROPHETS.
By the Rev. C. Lattey, S.J., M.A.
It is of the nature of religion, if I may use a somewhat
hackneyed distinction, to contain a static and a dynamic
element, or again, to put it in a more concrete form, an
institutional and a personal aspect. Religion for the
most part is intensely conservative, both in what is
essential and what is not ; it keeps to the old faith and
the old forms, and is slow to admit even the most legiti-
mate development. Yet, on the other hand, it must
make a living appeal or perish ; and it is the very
stability of faith and form that enables it to do so. "I
know whom I have beheved " (2 Tim. i. 12) ; that is
the cry of every great religious leader down the ages,
of every religion, and modern attempts to modify the
attitude show little promise of lasting success.
The Mosaic Law, the system as such. Old Testament
religion upon its institutional side, has already been
dealt with by Dr. Bird, and much that he has
set forth is important for the understanding of the
present paper, since it supplies the necessary back-
ground. The personal side of Old Testament religion
is supplied in the main by the prophets ; through them
comes the direct appeal from the Divine Person to the
human, a sublime and spiritual appeal, yet often highly
anthropomorphic. Almighty God speaks at times in
the language of an emotion no less vivid and personal
than that which He seeks to arouse in His people. The
prophet is the human instrument by which He manifests
His mind, and makes this personal appeal. The dis-
41
42 THE PROPHETS
tinction between the institutional and the personal side
of the Old Testament religion, however, must not be
drawn too sharply. Moses the lawgiver was himself
a prophet, and the greatest of the prophets up till the
very times of Christ ; and the later prophets constituted
a permanent institution, recognised as such by the Law,
in Deuteronomy xviii. 15-22. With this authentic
declaration we may commence an examination of the
nature of Old Testament prophecy, and later pass to
the consideration of the function it fulfilled. In both
parts of the paper the indication, rather than the
substance of argument must sufhce ; the vastness of
the subject and the limits of time permit no more.
The prophet is the spokesman of God ; the very word
" prophet " signifies as much in the Greek whence it is
derived, and most probably the corresponding Hebrew
word also. That he may be God's spokesman two
essential conditions are required, revelation and mission,
God must speak to the prophet, and also commission
the prophet to repeat what He has said. That is the
idea of prophecy that we find in the Old Testament, both
in the Book of Deuteronomy and in the writings of the
prophets themselves. Revelation and mission, the
message and the command to deliver it, alike stand out
clearly in Deuteronomy xviii. 18-19 ; here and else-
where, to avoid discussion and delay, I translate direct
from the Hebrew : —
" I will raise them up a prophet from among their
brethren, like to thee, and I will put My words in his
mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I shall
command him. And it shall be, that whoso will not
hearken to My words, which he shall speak in My
name, I will require it of him."
THE PROPHETS 43
Thus the words are God's, put into the prophet's mouth,
spoken in His name, and by His command. Revelation
and mission are reinforced by the threat against any
that will not hearken. Then comes the command to
slay impostors ; he is an impostor whose prediction
does not come true. To this test we shall return.
Revelation and mission are also clearly indicated, for
example, in the larger prophetic works that have come
down to us. Isaiah, after his vision of the Lord in
glory, receives the divine command, " Go, and tell this
people " (Isa. vi. 9) ; to Jeremiah also, like unto Moses
in his diffidence no less than in his meekness, it is said,
"To whomsoever (or possibly, to whatsoever) I shall
send thee, thou shalt go, and whatsoever I shall com-
mand thee thou shalt speak .... I have put My words
in thy mouth " (Jer. i. 7, 9) ; Ezechiel, like Isaiah,
beholds the glory of God before receiving his commission :
the vision occupies the first chapter, and the commission
the second and third, wherein he is told more than once
that he is sent of the Lord, and is to speak the words of
the Lord. Thus in each of these cases we have clearly
the divine message, and the command to promulgate
it ; but in reality both are indicated every time that a
prophet uses the common phrase, " Thus saith the
Lord."
In revelation and mission, then, we have the essentials
of prophecy. It cannot be necessary to insist that it
was not essential that the prophet should commit his
prophecy to writing, seeing that we have such striking
examples in proof as Elias and Eliseus (Elijah and
Elisha). Such records of the prophets' utterances as
have come down are guaranteed to us by the fact that
they are found in inspired books ; this, again, was in no
44 THE PROPHETS
way bound to be, though it is all to our advantage.
The two prophets named worked miracles, by which the
truth of their mission was attested : such at least is the
Old Testament version of the matter, and it is the only
evidence available, distasteful as it may be to some
modern sceptics ; a striking example is the trial between
Elias and the false prophets on Carmel (HI. [I.] Kings
xviii.). But neither can miracles be called essential to
the prophet, valuable as they may be in confirmation
of his mission. They are conspicuous by their absence
in the case of the Baptist ; " John did no sign " (John x.
41)-
Even prediction cannot be considered strictly essential
to the prophet ; but here we have to make a distinction,
if I may put it this way with all reverence, between
short-distance and long-distance prophecy. The former,
to be verified almost at once, may serve as a test of
revelation and mission, the one test indicated in Deu-
teronomy ; if what the would-be prophet has sought to
foretell do not come to pass, the Lord has not spoken
by him (Deut. xviii. 22). Conversely, we may suppose
(though it is not said) that the fulfilment of a prediction
might go a long way to prove revelation and mission.
We have examples both of the positive and negative
effect. The false prophets had promised victory to
Achab and Josaphat ; but Micheas (Micaiah) prophesied
the defeat that was to come (III. [I.] Kings xxii.). And
Jeremiah refutes Hananiah's promise of deliverance
from Babylon by the prediction of Hananiah's own
death, which is soon fulfilled (Jer. xxviii.).
A study of the false prophets confirms the conclusion
drawn from the study of the true ; what is found lacking
in them is precisely mission and revelation. Of long-
THE PROPHETS 45
distance prophecy, chiefly messianic in character, I
shall speak later ; evidently it could not serve as a test,
nor can it be said strictly to be of the essence of prophecy.
Other tests of mission and revelation of course existed
besides those already touched upon ; the whole life and
character of the prophet, the comparison of his teaching
with divine truth already known, and so forth.
Such is in broad outline the Old Testament conception
of the nature of prophecy. It is to be found in all the
relevant evidence on the subject ; it was enforced by the
prophets themselves, even by the false prophets, and was
accepted by the people at large. Nevertheless, when
we come to examine more closely that revelation which
lies at the root of the whole conception, it is no longer
possible to proceed in peace and security. While
CathoHcs and most believing Christians admit readily
enough that the whole subject of immediate communi-
cation between God and man is obscure and difficult,
those who believe less, or who believe little or nothing,
are apt to treat it as a fundamental axiom, a point
beyond all dispute, that such immediate communication
is entirely out of the question. And so, if he looks
outside of his own communion, the Catholic scholar finds
whole commentaries absolutely dominated by this
presupposition, that none the less would usually be called
moderate and even conservative. The presupposition
is seldom avowed ; sometimes, indeed, the author or
editor himself hardly seems to be aware of the extent
to which it influences his whole exegesis. Nevertheless,
it is often the fact — more often than not, I should think,
among serious scholars outside the Catholic Church
as I understand it — that an explanation involving
revelation or miracle is looked upon as no explanation
46 THE PROPHETS
at all, but merely a problem still unsolved ; and this
attitude is taken up, consciously or unconsciously, even
by those who profess to believe in what we may shortly
describe as a personal God.
To deal with such presuppositions would evidently
take us far afield, far away from prophecy as such. It
must be enough to suggest briefly two causes that may
help to explain their presence and influence, the neglect
both of sound philosophy and of sound history. No
doubt some non-Catholic scholars have come to the
study of Holy Writ with philosophical opinions already
formed, as a result of philosophical studies, and these
opinions have sometimes been of a subversive character.
But it is my impression that such scholars have often
lacked a proper grounding in philosophy, and have not
themselves recognised the necessity of resting their
exegetical and theological conclusions upon it. Philos-
ophy cannot supply for religion, but a false philosophy
can subvert religion. A Christian theory of God, the
soul and knowledge is a need of human reason if there
is to be Christian faith. Such a theory will also save
the scholar from a distortion of historical evidence.
Modern exegesis is apt to resolve itself into hacking
one's way through the only available evidence, under the
hypnotising influence of a theory of natural evolution
which peremptorily excludes all divine intervention.
A Catholic, too, comes to the study of Holy Writ with
some principles already firm in his mind, let us not deny
it ; but they are principles open and avowed, which he
is fully prepared to discuss, nor is he afraid to admit
occasional difficulties in their application, or to define
their exact force and influence upon him. I am very
far from wishing to impute bad faith to the typical
THE PROPHETS 47
non-Catholic exegete of to-day ; nevertheless, he does
need to think and to express himself more clearly, more
adequately and even ruthlessly, more frankly. He
needs to think out all his own methods and implications,
to try to get to the bottom of things, to take nothing for
granted unawares.
Having dared to say so much, and in a way that I
hope will give no offence, let me turn to discuss the
question, so far as it admits of discussion, as to how the
prophet comes by his revelation. A theory has lately
been put forward which I may briefly call the medium-
istic hypothesis, which would explain, and explain
away, the prophetic revelation by supposing the prophet
to be endowed with the same kind of properties as a
medium, without, however, allowing a divine message
in the true sense. Let it suffice here to say that the
occupation of a medium does not appear to be profitable
for mind or body ; the prophets are made of sterner
stuff. The theory of subliminal consciousness is more
often put forward without this accretion ; the prophet's
pent up feelings gather in force till they explode with the
irresistible conviction of a divine impulse : " Thus
saith the Lord ! " Here, as elsewhere, my criticism
must be summary, since it has seemed best to cover a
great deal of ground. I would remark, then, that the
prophets themselves, and also those who accepted them
as such, would certainly have regarded such a view
with horror, as excluding any divine message in the true
sense, and putting them on a level with the false prophets,
and that their illusion must have assumed colossal pro-
portions, both in the intensity and the duration of their
conviction. Sometimes, too, the reception and pro-
mulgation of the divine message does violence to the
48 THE PROPHETS
whole bent of the prophet's nature ; Jeremiah, for
example, seems to be nervous, anxious to escape,
broken-hearted. " Woe is me, my mother," he cries,
" Thou hast borne me a man of strife and contention
to the whole earth " (xv. lo). At other times the period
of internal incubation appears to be unreasonably
short : it needs but a night to make Nathan realise that
David is not to build the Temple after all (II. Kings
[II. Sam.] vii.), and perhaps not half-an-hour to make
Isaiah retract his divine message of death to Ezechiah
(IV.[II.] Kings XX.)
There is another argument, to which also I must fail
to do justice. The arm of the Lord is not shortened ;
the evidence for direct communication between God
and man, like that for miracle, comes down in con-
tinuous stream to our own times. For the last instance,
and that in our own century, I may mention the wonder-
ful, nay, astounding case of Gemma Galgani, in whom,
among other things, our Lord renewed the outward
tokens of His Passion. His Eminence Cardinal Gasquet
has contributed a preface to the English translation of
her life. True, the mission of such Catholic mystics
cannot be put on a level with that of the prophets, nor
does the Church require our assent to the truth of their
revelation. Nevertheless, from a purely historical point
of view the evidence in their favour is often, as in the
case mentioned, far superior to that in favour of the
prophets, and has been subjected by competent eye-
witnesses themselves to searching scrutiny. The ex-
periences of the later mystics, in fact, throw a valuable
light upon the phenomena of prophecy, upon the manner
in which the divine action affects intellect and sense
and so forth. If there still be those who have nothing
THE PROPHETS 49
better than a blank denial for all this mass of evidence
from Old and New Covenant — well, let us say one last
word to them, and not a very new one at that : there
are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of
either in their philosophy or their history.
The nature of prophecy is the more important ques-
tion ; that of the function we may treat briefly under
three headings, the function of prophecy with reference
to past, present and future. The modern evolutionary
hypothesis supposes the prophets to have developed
themselves almost all that was worth having in the
religion of Israel, and in order to dispose of any recal-
citrant evidence passes them through the same mincing
machine as the Books of Moses and Josue. No doubt
there is a certain development of doctrine to be observed
in the prophetic writings, indeed, this very consideration
of their doctrine is a powerful motive for regarding
the less developed Pentateuch, or even that part of it
usually called the Priestly Code, as the starting-point
rather than the consummation of their labours. Yet
in the main the prophets enforce acknowledged obliga-
tions and established beliefs ; most of all they presuppose
that clear conception of a personal God without which
there could be no question of revelation or mission.
With Faith and Law to precede them, the prophets are
fairly intelligible ; to invert the order is to put the
cart before the horse. " The Lord shall roar from Sion,"
begins Amos, " and utter His voice from Jerusalem."
If the critics reject this verse, the main reason is pre-
cisely because it presupposes the Mosaic Law as we
know it, with Jerusalem in the privileged position of the
central sanctuary ; given the Mosaic Law akeady in
50 THE PROPHETS
force, nothing could be more natural. And the late
Prof. Wellhausen, whose Teutonic yoke appears to be
fastened upon our necks more firmly than ever since the
War, in order to invest the rival sanctuaries, the high
places, with a legal and venerable antiquity, such as
would subvert the unique claim of Jerusalem founded
upon the Mosaic Law, performs the somewhat starthng
exploit of entirely overlooking the idolatry which the
evidence of the historical books shows to have been
practised there. 1 have touched upon these points
in an article on " The Ark of the Covenant," in the Irish
Ecclesiastical Record for February, 1918 — one of a series
on Pentateuch problems, two or three of which in some
measure support the contention, which in any case I
cannot urge any further here, that in the main the
prophets assume doctrine rather than, as the " critics "
would say, manufacture it.
The function of prophecy, then, with regard to the
past was to keep alive ancient standards of faith and
religion, and even to infuse into them a life more vigorous
still. This sufficiently indicates a function in respect
of the present also, which, however, must be conceived
on very large lines. The prophets were even more
responsible for the guidance of Israel in faith and con-
duct than might at first sight appear. The priesthood
of the Old Testament was essentially and almost ex-
clusively a sacrificial and liturgical priesthood ; it is
astonishing to find how little is said about any teaching
function. This latter chiefly fell to the prophets, and
was afterwards taken up by the scribes ; it was not the
priests that sat in the chair of Moses. We thus appear
to have a different working system in Old and New
Covenant ; in the former there does not seem to be an
THE PROPHETS 51
absolutely permanent infallible teaching body, but a
broken series of prophetical teachers, extraordinary rather
than ordinary messengers of divine truth, which they
receive by special revelation, and promulgate by word
of mouth, and sometimes by inspired writing also.
Under the Old Covenant also, we have a progressive
revelation, though not to the extent that some would
suppose ; under the New we have a deposit of faith
closed once and for all after the death of the Apostles,
though a certain development is possible in the better
understanding and explanation of it.
Further, the prophets were the guides of Israel even
in matters of state ; it may be enough to cite Isaiah's
warning not to rely upon Egypt (Isa. xxx. 1-7). The
Old Covenant is a theocracy wherein is no limit to the
divine guidance ; yet it would be a mistake to suppose
that the Hebrews could not distinguish between religious
and civil allegiance. The story of Joseph and of Daniel
and much else offers positive proof to the contrary.
Some of the prophets may have directed a more or less
ascetic hfe led by those called the sons of the prophets ;
but this subject is rather obscure.
Guidance in action brings us to the function of
prophecy with respect to the future, which indeed has
already been involved to some extent in the discussion
of what has been called short-distance prophecy, upon
which there is no need to return. Rather let us in
conclusion consider long-distance prophecy, and in
general the larger hope of Israel. Types there were,
persons and things and events signifying persons and
things and events of greater import still to come. In
the main, types are a sign to believers rather than un-
believers ; yet some of them are very striking, for
52 THE PROPHETS
example, the paschal lamb, viewed in the light of the
Johannine writings.
There is also to be found in prophecy what I venture
to call compenetration, a form of prophetic idealisation,
wherein the more immediate present fades away, as it
were, into the mightier fulfilment of the same divine
counsel, which gradually glows through till it takes full
possession of the screen. Let me present this doctrine
in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, from the preface to
his commentary on the Psalms : —
" Prophecies are sometimes uttered about things
which existed at the time in question, but are not
uttered primarily with reference to them, but in so
far as they are a figure of things to come ; and there-
fore the Holy Ghost has provided that when such
prophecies are uttered, some details should be
inserted which go beyond the actual thing done, in
order that the mind may be raised to the thing
signified. Thus in Daniel many things are said of
Antiochus as a figure of Antichrist ; wherefore some
things are therein read which were not accom-
plished in the case of Antiochus, but will be
fulfilled in Antichrist. Thus, too, some things are
read about the kingdom of David and Solomon,
which were not to find fulfilment in the kingdom of
these men, but they have been fulfilled in the
kingdom of Christ, in figure of whom they were
said. Such is Psalm Ixxi., 'Give to the king thy
judgment, O God,' which, according to its title, deals
with the kingdom of David and Solomon, but there
is something said therein which exceeds the power
of that kingdom, viz., 'In his days shall justice
spring up, and abundance of peace, till the moon
THE PROPHETS 53
be taken away'; and again, 'He shall rule from sea
to sea, and from the river unto the ends,' etc. This
psalm, therefore, is expounded of the kingdom of
Solomon, in so far as it is a figure of the kingdom
of Christ, in whom all things there said shall be
fulfilled."
St. Thomas is doubtless basing his view in great part
upon St. Jerome's note on Daniel xi. 21 ff. As we are
holding these conferences in honour of this great biblical
doctor, it may be well to quote also the words wherein
for the first time, in what may be called the greatest of
his commentaries, he explicitly sets forth this important
teaching. He sets it forth, however, not as something
new and original, but as the current Catholic opinion
of his day, that Antiochus was a t^npe of Antichrist,
" and that what befell Antiochus beforehand in part is to
be accomplished in Antichrist in full. And that this
is the wont of Holy Writ, to anticipate in types the truth
of things that are to be, as in what is said of the Lord
Saviour in Psalm Ixxi., which has Solomon's name
prefixed to it, whereas all that is said of Him cannot
apply to Solomon. For he did not endure 'with the
sun and before the moon, throughout all generations ' . . .
But in part and, as it were, in a shadow and image of the
truth, these things were anticipated in Solomon, that
they might be more perfectly fulfilled in the Lord Saviour.
As therefore the Saviour has both Solomon and the other
holy men as a type of His coming, so Antichrist has that
most wicked king Antiochus."
This principle of the blending or compenetration of
type and antitype appears to go back to St. Peter
himself, in the discourse recorded in Acts ii. T4-36 ; and
the importance of it has been recognised by more
54 THE PROPHETS
than one recent Catholic writer. Not being able to
expound the subject so fully as I should wish, I may
perhaps be allowed to refer for a more detailed treatment
to the chapter on " Christ in Type and Prophecy " in
my little book, Back to Christ, where also it may be
seen how His Eminence Cardinal Billot has appHed the
principle to the child of Isaiah vii.
Direct predictions we also find, long-distance prophecies
in the strictest sense. Jacob, for example, prophesies
of Judah in words which it appears fairiy safe to translate
thus :
"The sceptre shall not pass from Judah,
Nor the staff from between his feet,
Until he come whose it is,
And to him shall be the obedience of the peoples."
(Gen. xlix. lo.)
Thus, when Judah has finally lost its independence, the
kingly sceptre in peace and the marshal's staff in war,
the Messiah is to come to save the nations. But He
is to save them through His passion and death, foretold
in poems which my friend Pere Condamin at Hastings
has so ably translated and expounded in his edition of
Isaiah. This death, again, is re-enacted in the universal
sacrifice among the nations which Malachy foretells shall
supplant the sacrifices in the Temple. To set forth these
and other prophecies at length has seemed upon the
whole of less importance than to insist upon the funda-
mental principles of prophecy as such. One feature
may be singled out, however, common to the three
prophecies just mentioned, and repeated in the Psalms
and elsewhere, to which also emphatical appeal is made
in the New Testament, for example, by St. James at
Jerusalem (Acts xv. 17) and by St. Paul in his epistle to
THE PROPHETS 55
the Romans (e.g. xv. 9-12) : it is the strong universalism
that appears again and again in the Old Testament, the
marvellous and God-given conviction that so small a
people were big with blessing for all mankind.
And how was it to be fulfilled ? That God, who had
so striven to present Himself as a hving Person to His
people through the prophets, was at the last to woo them
in the Flesh itself, to found a New Covenant, wherein
should be neither Jew nor Greek, but Himself all in all.
IV.
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
By the Rev. C. C. MARTINDALE, S.J., M.A.
I AM scarcely exaggerating when I say that an incident,
which I have related perhaps too often, came as a sort
of revelation to me. A young chauffeur once asked me
what I thought of Sunday cinemas. He approved of
them ; he had been to one, and seen a film representing
the Life of Christ. " If I'd not been to that cinema,"
said he, "I might not so much as have heard of Jesus
Christ." " Jack," I said, " how is that possible ?
You're 22 ! " Well, his parents had died when he was
a child ; the Board School hadn't mentioned Jesus
Christ ; the garage assuredly had not taught him about
that Life. At 22 the lad knew nothing of our Lord.
" Why," I added, " d'you use His name so much to
swear by then ? " " Why," he retorted, " does your
sort say ' By Jove ' ? " "I don't know ; they don't
mean anything particular by it." " No more don't I,"
he answered, " when I says ' Christ '."
It would be out of place were I to insist on the ap-
palling nemesis that has befallen a country which
claimed, once, to have restored the pure Gospel, to have
re-established the rule of the One Mediator, and has now
lost Gospel alike and knowledge of its Saviour. No
one, I fancy, wiU maintain we are any more a Bible-
reading nation ; and a notable book. The Army and
56
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 57
Religion, while agreeing that the Army — that is, the
ordinary EngUshman — was Theist, asked lately if it
was Christian, and had to answer " No."
At least, the Bible-Christian of an eariier generation
knew much about our Lord, His words and works, His
lovableness. The heavy-burdened knew they could
turn to Him ; they went, and He gave them rest. In a
thousand ways the Church has ever kept Christ and
Christian intimately linked ; super-eminently, by the
Communion of His Real Presence in the Eucharist. But
through the Gospels we at least learn about Him, and
that is why no Congress like this one could dream of
omitting to speak of the Person of Jesus Christ, of
whom the Old Testament prophesied, towards whom
the New looks back, union through whom with God is
the aim and scope of divine Revelation.
*****
Tiiirty, or even twenty, even ten, years ago, the writer
of a paper such as this might have felt more seriously
embarrassed than I need — embarrassed, at any rate, for
at least two reasons which are no more so cogent, if
at all.
To-day we can safely say that the historical existence
of Jesus of Nazareth is outside dispute. Even before
the nineteenth century, Dupuis and Volney asserted
that the gospels were a mere tissue of astral myths,
symbols, allegories. They possessed no historical foun-
dation in a human life. These men were grotesquely
unscientific : but while Bruno Bauer saw in Christ
merely an ideal figure, a sort of visionary " anti-Caesar "
created by the social misery of the under-classes in the
Graeco-Roman world, he seemingly supported his thesis
with scientific argument. Kalthoff also argued that
58 CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
the person of Jesus was a literary fiction created to
support an ideal conception of " Christ," the King
needed to be head of a longed-for Kingdom ; J. M.
Robertson supposed Him to have been the hero of a
semi-pagan, semi-Jewish miracle-play ; Jensen con-
sidered the Gospels to be a Judaised version of the
Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh ; B. Smith and A. Drews
thought that the stories about Jesus were invented to
consohdate a mystical faith in Christ, and so on. Erbt
regarded the Gospels as a solar myth ; and Niemojewski
perceived that in Matthew Christ is a solar deity, in
Luke a lunar deity, that Herod the Great, Herod
Antipas, Herodias and Salome are the constellations of
Aquarius, Scorpio, Cassiopeia and Andromeda respec-
tively, and that the Cross is the Milky Way. I have
chosen these names to show how this school has toppled
over into nonsense ; I need scarcely refer you to M. J.
Lagrange's Sens du Christianisme (translated into
Enghsh by Dr. W. S. Reilly, S.S.) for the refutation of
all this, when M. Guignebert, an extreme rationahst,
has, in his Probleme de Jesus, made us reahse that
criticism is not likely to pursue this path. The future
need not trouble itself over that problem.
What has ruined so much of this sort of theorising at
the base is, partly, the tremendous swing-back of
criticism in the matter of dating the Gospels, and of
their authenticity. Doubtless this is in great measure
due to Harnack ; and the work he has done on the Lucan
writings affects both Gospel and Acts ; and though St.
Matthew is still more disputed than St. Mark, and St.
John than either, it remains that a Cathohc, who would
have looked a fool in learned eyes if, thirty years ago,
he had maintained the traditional dates and authorships.
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 59
can do so now and find himself practically coinciding
with the conclusions of much independent scholarship.
As for St. John, I will quote as symptomatic — no more
than that — a sentence lately written by a reviewer of
Bishop Gore's Epistles of St. John in the Oxford Magazine :
" [the writer] is inclined to think that . . . the Johan-
nine authorship [will] become, like Bentley's digamma,
no longer a prophetic vision, but a doctrine to be held
by all sane men." If this holds for the Epistles, a fortiori
it holds for the Gospel.
As for St. Paul, I have never been able to drive myself
into that state of mind which accepts as his the four
" great " epistles, Romans, Corinthians I. and //., and
Galatians, and rejects or doubts the others, especially
Colossians, Philippians, or Ephesians. I feel with Dr.
Headlam, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, whom
Fr. Lattey quotes in his Back to Christ, p. 18, that
" Ephesians is Pauline through and through, and more
even than Romans represents the deepest thoughts of
the Apostles, and to [doubt its integrity] shows an
incapacity to form a judgment of any value in critical
matters." So for the others.
As for the reliability of our New Testament, I con-
sider that the different rationalist schools have defeated
one another. Thus I think that the French schools,
like Loisy's, however unsatisfactory in other ways, have
at least discredited the sort of " liberal protestant
pastor " whom Harnack, for example, sees to underlie
the Gospel portrait of our Lord ; and that Germany has
disproved those of its own schools, and Loisy's school,
who picture a merely eschatological Christ, a Jewish
enthusiast expecting an inominent end to the world,
preaching an interim religion and founding no Church
6o CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
which should outlast his generation. Many of the argu-
ments which demolish the " mythical " explanation of
Christ to which I alluded, defeat too the syncretist
schools which imagine that Greek, Asiatic, Egyptian
and other rituals and formulas conspired to create the
infant Church, which proceeded then to reconstruct its
historical memories of Jesus to suit itself. For a review
of this situation I again recommend Lagrange's Sens
du Christianisme.
St. Paul in particular I wish to emphasise as reliable.
Not only he could proclaim, quite generally, that if he
himself or an angel from heaven preached anything
which did not coincide with what he always had preached,
he must be held anathema, but you clearly see that at
all points he had resort to the original apostles, men
far less intellectual or imperial-minded than he, tested
his own Gospel by theirs, checked it, was acknowledged
as not deviating from it, and was commissioned by them
to preach it. Throughout the New Testament, its
authors and its heralds, there is spiritual and doctrinal
sohdarity ; Paul is not against Peter, nor the Synoptists
alien to St. John.
Our knowledge of Jesus must be the knowledge given
by the New Testament, massively and as a whole.
Now taking the New Testament as a whole, it might
be more scientific to display what was the faith preached
to and believed by the earliest Church as deduced from
the earhest documents, i.e. some of St. Paul's letters
whether his earhest of all was Thessalonians or {vid.
Westminster Version, Galatians) the Galatians. You
would there see the whole Christian Faith of Trinity,
Incarnation, Redemption, and the Church not exactly
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 6i
codified and asserted as such, but what is far more
significant, alluded to, almost en passant, as familiar
and known. This is far better evidence for the universal
Christian faith, as being something that can be pre-
supposed and taken for granted, than any series of
protests or new definitions. But I would rather outline
the portrait of Christ as it first showed itself to His
contemporaries, and study the documents which, if not
as they stand the earhest, yet portray the earhest period,
and do so with such simplicity, such coherence, such
naiveness of realism yet transcendence of doctrine, as to
make any unsophisticated reader certain that the picture
is true to life.
The public life of Jesus began tacitly. The fierce
ascetic Baptist cried aloud ; the city thronged out to
him. But mingled in the crowd, Christ came, indis-
tinguishable. And when He began, in His turn, to
preach, His message too seemed unoriginal — the Coming
of a Kingdom. It was the ancient Jewish hope ; Christ,
like any prophet, you would at first have said, is come
— is sent — has for His work to announce just that ; and
to that, sends those who group themselves around Him.
But gradually, through the parables, through the dis-
courses, the notion of the Kingdom developes itself as
beyond anything that Old Testament vision had descried.
Is it for the Jews, or to be world-wide ? Contemporary,
or for the future ? A gradual growth, or catastrophic ?
Within the soul, or visible, material ? To be earned, or
to be received, free favour from God, who alone can give
it ? The enigma is insoluble till you perceive it is all
of these things. It has begun ; yet it is not consum-
mated ; from Judaea it arises, but its limits are the
world's and the temporal shall extend into eternity. It
62 CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
is a pearl to be bought by every sacrifice ; yet it is God's
gift to His beloved ; it is a city on a hill, a lamp on a
lamp-stand ; yet a leaven working secretly ; a hidden
grain, germinating through heat and cold, rain and wind
and sleep, suddenly, some day only, to dazzle you by a
field full of vivid green.
Alas, it may be resisted ; it is forced on none ; the
guests refuse their invitation, swine would but trample
on the Pearl ; to the end Jerusalem refuses her Saviour's
brooding wings : nay, even within the Kingdom's net
there are good fish and bad ; in its field, tares grow
within the wheat, only at long last to be cast forth, back
to the barren sea, or to burn.
However, you may perceive more and more that the
emphasis lay on the changed heart ; for its sake, the
exterior and material existed. Pharisee, Scribe, were —
weU, if not wholly wrong, at least not right enough :
the triumph of the Kingdom was the essential alteration
of the fountain of the soul's life, a complete annihilation
of separative self-love ; a purification of far beyond
mere behaviour ; an assimilation to the perfection of the
Father, in favour of which all that might prevent it
must be abandoned, hand cut off, eye plucked out ;
riches at least be feared ; home, parents, perhaps
abandoned ; nay, a Cross be shouldered and carried
every day. This new heart, our Lord makes clear, is to
succeed precisely in proportion as it approaches, by a
special route, to the divine Perfection. Impossible con-
ception even for the highest of Hebrew seers ! It was
the Hebrew prerogative to insist on the unapproachable-
ness of God, however deep His condescension towards
His elect. " My thoughts are not as your thoughts,
neither are your ways My ways, saith Yahweh. For as
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 63
the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways
higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your
thoughts." But Christ re-reveals the Father. This is
not the place to relate in detail that radical revelation.
Enough to say that He shows God to be such in tender
intimacy and homeliness of paternal love as to offer to the
individual soul a new access based on a new relationship
possible or actual. But how, a Jew, hearing this from
Christ's lips, might ask, how can You give that revela-
tion so as to convince us of its reUability ? In many
ways our Lord offered His guarantees : prophecy fulfilled
in Himself ; Messianic miracles worked, in God's name,
by Him. But, for us, at least, and for all who " heard"
Him, who " came to Him," most cogent of all is the
terrific asseveration
All things are given over to me by my Father,
And no one fully knows the Son save the Father,
Nor does any one fully know the Father save the Son,
And he to whom the Son may choose to reveal Him.
(Matt. xi. 27. Luke x. 22.)
The unique revelation is rooted in the unique relation
of Jesus Himself to the Father. Herein our Lord
transcends even that title. Son of Man, known by now
to be at least Messianic, which He appropriates alto-
gether to Himself ; herein He says more than that, as in
the Parable (Matt. xxi. 28, and xxii. 2), He is the ex-
clusive son and heir, and indicates that all the Prophets
are servants, as of the Father, so of Himself ; more
even than when (Mark xiii. 32) we see that He exalts
Himself so high that the very angels are below Him.
He asserts a perfect reciprocity of knowledge between
Himself and the Eternal and Infinite Father of all
things, and therefore one of nature ; and not because He
64 CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
is Messiah is He to be called " Son of God," but because
He is one with God, He can reveal Him to the world
and save it.
Herein is the explanation, at last, of why in an un-
shared way our Lord speaks of God as " My Father " ;
and of Himself as The Son in a unique and essential way,
the more noticeable for His insistence, throughout, upon
God's Universal Fatherhood and the brotherhood of all
mankind in Him.
Christ is the co-equal son of the Father, and to men
He offers a gift that is divine.
Do not fear that this transcendent revelation will
spoil for you the Humanity of Jesus. Read the Gospels,
and you will never forget Bethlehem and Mary and her
baby : the shepherds, the starlit flight : Jesus at His
carpentering ; the sick at sunset ; the children in His
arms ; Olivet, Gennesareth, nor Gethsemane, and the
fear and the heartbreak ; the frightful struggle of a life
against its imminent violent ending ; the scourge, the
crown, the carrying of the Cross, the nails ; the ultimate
proof of humanity, His Death. So tenderly, so gently
through aU the tiniest, most customary things of life,
as through its tremendous ultimate necessities, is the
vast revelation given, that without fear of — I will not
say, alas, refusal, but of frightening us by His due glory,
He can place Himself at the centre of the world, and say :
" Come unto ME, all ye that labour, and are heavy
laden ; take My yoke upon you and learn of ME, for
I am meek and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest
for your souls."
Do not imagine that Paul is any more foreign to our
humanity than are the first three Gospels. At any rate,
it is Hebrews that tells us we have not merely some High
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 65
Priest, who cannot sympathise with our weaknesses,
but that Christ was tested at all points, just as we are,
though without sin. To me, Paul, through and through,
was permeated with the humanity of Jesus — especially
Christ crucified, Christ with whom he was co-crucified,
co-buried, Christ who emptied Himself by taking the
form of a slave and becoming in the hkeness of men ;
and being recognised by His fashion — what we could see
of Him, as man, humbled Himself [yet further] by
becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the
Cross.
And it is John who tells us of that which his eyes had
seen, his hands had handled, in many an exquisite in-
cident left unrecorded by the Synoptists ; of the mid-
night talk with Nicodemus ; of Jacob's well, and how
our Lord let Himself sink there, exhausted — sedehat sic
with no less tenderness than Mark when he relates how
Christ slept in the storm-tossed boat, His head upon a
pillow. Read and re-read the washing of the Feet and
the discourse and the prayer of Thursday evening ; in
no literature has a human love so pure, so strong, so
unutterably intimate been told of.
But what Paul cries to the world is more than that.
Through Christ, existing before all creation, all creation
came to be, and in Him its true existence is, and from
Him. For God, who in many ways and fragments had
revealed Himself of old, summed up that revelation in
the person of a Son, the exact Image of God the In-
visible, His Effulgence, Light from Light, the Impress of
His substance, as stamp corresponds to seal — Jesus is
the Lord — is Yahweh, and Heir of all things. So for
John. In the beginning existed that Word which is the
Father's thought and the adequate expression of that
66 CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
thought ; He was along with God, and He was God.
He shared God's glory before the world was, and thence
into our world proceeded, and thither from our world
returned ; " Whoso hath seen Me, hath seen the Father,"
" The Father remains in Me and I in Him," " I and the
Father are one thing."
Pre-existence then, and Incarnation : but Incarna-
tion, why ?
That we might, says Paul, be co-risen, co-heirs, co-
glorified, co-kings with Him ; that we might, says St.
John, "have life in His name," "have life," says our
Lord Himself, "and have it more abundantly."
It is Paul's clear doctrine that to the race was given,
in the person of Adam, a supernatural hfe, impl}dng a
supernatural union with God and a destiny of eternal,
supernatural happiness. Adam, by his sin, lost it, and
we, incorporated with him, lost it too. " In Adam,
all died." By a new incorporation, with a Second
Adam, who has that hfe, and life, not by favour, this
time, but by nature, we are to recover it. " In Christ
shall all be made aUve." In Christ — a tiny phrase, yet
used 164 times, in those letters of St. Paul which remain
to us. For all is in it. Herein is Redemption, hereby
Glorification. Christ, by His obedience unto death,
nailed to His Cross the handwriting that was against
us, and by His resurrection proved that when we
incorporate ourselves with Him, we do so with that
which is Immortal. Forthwith springs into existence
the complement of Christ — " the Church which is His
Body, the Plenitude of Him who thus completes Him-
self." " You are Christ's body (collectively), and
[individually] His members . . . unto the building up
of the body of Christ into a perfect man, unto the measure
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 67
of the stature of the Plenitude of Christ . . . who is the
Head " (Eph. iv. 12). Of this mystic Christ, the Spirit
is as it were the soul ; "He who adheres to the Lord
is one Spirit " (i Cor. vi. 17). This Spirit is our principle
of cohesion, of vital action ; we hve in Him (Gal. v. 25),
walk in Him (Gal. v. 16), under His impulse take the
shape of Christ (2 Cor. iii. 18), " I live, no longer I, but
Christ lives in me," even as I am in Him.
I have no space to speak of Paul's other metaphors
— expressive of that union of Christian and Christ
which is no metaphor — that one, but many-chambered
house (hke John's sanctuary in the Apocalypse, wherein
each Uving pillar is inbuilded into the whole) — the union
of Spouse and his beloved. Impossible to exaggerate
the reality of the inpouring of Christ's hfe into our hfe.
Impossible, too, even to outline adequately St. John's
promulgation of the same truth. We must be born again
— from above — have God's creative spirit inbreathed
into us. We must receive God's free gift of living
water so that it becomes in us a fountain leaping up
into Eternal Life, and overbrims ourselves and gives
life to the world. The restoration of the paralytic to
Hfe, nay, of dead Lazarus to hfe, is nothing compared
to that leaping forth of human life into the life of super-
nature, a new life compared with which the best of the
old is as death. And how appropriate this Life ?
Again, by union with Him who gives it, because He has
it, and has it, because He is it." I AM the resurrection,"
" I AM the life," " No man cometh to the Father save
by Me." By Christ's own life are we nourished : the
patriarchs ate bread from heaven, but they died ; He
that eateth my bread shall never die — for / am the
Bread from Heaven, and that bread which I shall give
68 CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
for the life of the world, is my Flesh — He that eateth
my Flesh and drinketh my Blood HATH Eternal Life —
he remaineth in Me and I in him. As ... I live by the
Father, so He that eateth me, shall live by Me, that as
" Thou," He prays to the Father, " art in Me and I in
Thee, so they may be in Us . . . one thing, as We are
one thing, I in them, and they in Me, that they may be
made complete into one." The Eucharist could not
nourish the only life for whose sake it exists, were it
anything less than the Living Christ, really and truly
present for the " deification " of our souls.
I cannot bring myself to finish this paper without
recalling the Apocalypse in which John sees focussed as
it were to a point the remaining history of the world —
the destruction of the great pagan anti-Christian Empire,
and the final destruction of sin and all that resists the
triumph of our Lord.
There are those who find this book's presentment of
Him harsh, or at least austere to the point of being
terrible ; at the outset He is seen endued with the
raiment, surrounded with the symbolism, proper to
Yahweh in the Old Testament ; as the book proceeds.
He rides forth as a Conqueror, a Triumphator ; He
wields a sword, His clothes are drenched in blood.
But not untrue to himself is the Apostle of Love.
Read the most tender even when most stern letters to
the Seven Churches, which are set in preface to the book.
See in what terms Christ promises His intimacy to the
victorious soul. The Conqueror shall be given a white
tessera, or badge, and on it a new name written, that
no one knows save Him who gives and him who receives
it — the new self — the new way of existing, to which
CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 69
the new name belongs, and which comes through,
which is, the supernatural union of Christ and Christian.
On the pillars of the new Temple are written three Names,
the Name of God, the Name of the New Jerusalem, and
" My own new Name." The soul is sealed as God's,
and it is an integral part of that divine Church that
Christ has builded, and — unfathomable condescension
of God who will not only give, but accepts — without the
incorporate Christian Christ Himself were less, the self
of His Plenitude were imperfect ; He wins His new self
whereby He is the Church's head, thanks precisely to the
fidehty and victory of the Church's members ; He too
has a New Name.
Last of all He says, " Behold, I am standing at the
door and am knocking : if a man hear My voice and open
the door, then I will enter in to him and I will eat with
him, and he with Me." Heart has met heart, and it is
enough. After all the visions, the high hymns of praise,
the thunders of many waters, the whole book calms
itself into the Church's expectant humble prayer.
Come ! " Yes," He answers, " Behold I come quickly."
*' Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen." For though, as
St. John elsewhere says, " to as many as receive Him, to
them He gives power to become sons of God," and " we
are called children of God, and so in fact we are," yet it
remains true that the manifestation of this present
reality is for the future, and though heaven is even now
in us, by grace, we are not yet, by glory, in our heaven.
We can say truly, both " I am at home here, in my
Father's house," and, " For thee, oh dear, dear
country, mine eyes their vigils keep."
The Jesus of Nazareth is the Jesus of Holy Communion
and the Judge of the world, and our reward eternally.
70 CHRIST IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
In the New Testament then we are shown a human hfe
of which a child can understand the lovableness and the
beauty, with which the poorest, the unhappiest, the
sick and the sinner can enter into the most intimate
sympathy ; a baby ; a working-man ; a man of lonehness
and fear ; of friendships, of hopes, and of heart-
break ; a man, in all this, untainted, never once
selfish, never untrue. And we are shown that this
same man is the Son of God made man, that thereby
He might knit us men into Himself, and thereby into
God, and thus into unity with one another, becoming
one bread of many grains, one Vine, with Him for
stem, ourselves for branches, ahve with one leaping
sap, that is the Spirit who inhabits us. All then, most
assuredly, is recapitulated into Christ, as St. Paul
says ; brought to a head in Him ; all the desire of the
ages, and all force for the future.
There are those whose duty it is to study the Christ of
Dogma : those who essay to discover, through old docu-
ments, the Christ of History : those, and in our country
they are many, who, despairing, it may be, of attaining
to either of these, content themselves with the Christ of
Experience. I should have to ask pardon of you, even
more humbly than I do, after these brief, fumbhng
words about the Son of God made man, had I wholly
failed to show you that these three are the same ; and
that the Jesus of Bethlehem and Calvary, the God-man
of theology, and the Christ of our Communions, our
Captain, Comrade, and Lover, are One, and the Life of
our whole soul.
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH IN THE
NEW TESTAMENT.
By the Rev. R. A. Knox, M.A.
The Catholic doctrine of the Church is one which needs
a double line of defence. In order to defend it, it is
necessary to prove in the first place that our Divine
Lord meant to leave behind Him an organized body of
followers, and in the second place that He meant to leave
that body organized in a particular way, and not in any
one of a dozen different ways which have been proposed
or adopted as rival interpretations. This second
question — whether, for example, our Lord Himself
instituted the episcopate, and whether He conferred
extraordinary privileges on St. Peter and his successors —
is one that is capable of statement only after a very full,
detailed treatment, and from the lips of an expert. It
is the former question, appealing as it does to a set of
general impressions rather than to a string of texts or a
catena of age-long controversy, that I want to consider
in this lecture — the question, namely, whether it was
in our Lord's intention to found an organization at all.
For, after all, outside a comparatively close circle of her
critics, the claims of the Church are set aside not, directly,
because she has a particular kind of organization, but
because she has so much of it ; and, often enough, when
71
72 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
you come to investigate the grievance, because she is an
organized body at all. The wiseacre of the modern
railway carriage has it laid up among his stock of in-
controvertible platitudes that he doesn't belong to any
religious body at all ; if one of his fellow-travellers looks
Hke an Anglican clergyman, he adds that if he did he
would be a Roman Catholic.
The issue can be put in a nutshell if we ask — Did our
Lord come to introduce into the world an abstract
thing, Christianity, or a concrete, though spiritual,
entity, Christendom ? Is the visible monument of His
sojourn in the world an influence over the thoughts and
hves of men, like that of Confucius, or an Institute, like
that of St. Ignatius ? Is the rude name of " Christian,"
shouted out by the street-boys of Antioch, inherited as
of right by everyone who conforms himself to Christ's
rule of life, and according to the measure in which he
succeeds, or does it belong, primarily, to a defined and
self-propagating religious corporation, with its own
forms of government and its own ceremonies ? Those
who, after Tolstoy and Renan, would represent our
Blessed Lord as an ethical idealist, and equally those
who, after Schweitzer, would represent Him as a chiliastic
fanatic, are forced to suppose that the outward shell of
institutional religion which has, historically, preserved
His record and His message, is a husk merely, discernible
from the true grain ; that its hierarchy, for example, and
its liturgy are, historically, accretions ; spiritually,
matters of indifference. There is another view which I
hope to set before you, which maintains that the con-
tinuation of His work by a visible, organized Society is an
integral part of our Lord's purpose in His Incarnation.
The name everywhere given to the Society which has.
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH 73
de facto, descended from Him is the E celesta. He used
that name Himself, when, for example, He hailed one of
His apostles as the foundation-stone of His ecclesia.
There was, at that time, already an ecclesia in existence —
a calling out of certain specially favoured souls from
among their fellow-men : it was, for practical purposes,
nearly equal in extent with an ethnographical unit, the
Jewish race. It, then, our Lord meant to have an
ecclesia of His own, some further selection is clearly
impHed, whether altogether inside, or altogether outside,
the old ecclesia, or as a fresh circle intersecting, so to
speak, the old circle. Now, when our Lord thus takes
it for granted, in speaking to a circle of not over-quick-
witted followers, that it is part of His purpose to estabHsh
an ecclesia of His own, it is hard to suppose that He was
introducing them suddenly to a quite unfamiliar idea.
He must have depended upon being understood from
His context. What is the context ? He has just been
hailed as the Messiah. Surely, then, His answer must
mean : " Yes, and as (at least) the Messiah, I have come
to institute a fresh ecclesia : it is on you, Peter, that I
mean to build it." The new Ecclesia is the complement,
the correlative, of the promised Messiah. What, then
were the ideas ordinarily entertained in the minds of our
Lord's contemporaries as to the Christ and His Church ?
A vast amount of attention has been devoted lately
to the eschatological writings which, lying outside the
Canon of Holy Scripture, mostly belong to a period
between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning
of the New. From a consideration of them we should
conclude that the expectations of the Chosen People
at the time of the Christian era were something as
follows. That there was to be a kingdom of God, either
74 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
upon the present earth (Ethiopian Enoch, 1-36, 83-104),
or in a new Creation {ib. 37-70), either temporary {ib.
91-104) or eternal {ib. 1-90), perhaps connected with a
Final Judgment, which would either precede {ib. 37-70)
or follow it {ib. 91-104, and Psalms of Solomon), such
judgment would be executed, perhaps on certain selected
classes of men and angels (Ethiopian Enoch, 90), perhaps
on all {ib. 37-70), the Kingdom and the judgment might
be connected with the coming of a personal Messiah
{ib. 83-90 ; Sibylline Oracles, No. 3), or it might not
(Ethiopian Enoch, 1-36, 91-104 ; Psalms of Solomon,
1-16) ; perhaps a Man, of the seed of David (Psalms of
Solomon, 17), perhaps a supernatural Being, described
as the Son of Man (Ethiopian Enoch, 37-70). Either at
the beginning (Ethiopian Enoch, 1-36) or at the end
{ib. 91-104) of the Kingdom there would perhaps be a
Resurrection, either of all mankind (Ethiopian Enoch,
51) or of the righteous only {ib. 37-70), which was to
take place either in the body {ib. 1-36) or in the spirit
{ib. 91-104), or in a new and spiritual body {ib. 37-70).
Finally, the Gentiles would either be converted {ib. 16)
or annihilated {ib. 37-70), or spared to serve the conquer-
ing Israehtes {ib. 90 ; Psalms of Solomon, 17).
It will be seen that at this period eschatology, as an
exact science, was in its infancy. But if we want to get
at the popular impressions our Lord was dealing with
(and it is only natural to suppose that He used language
in its popular meaning when He addressed a popular
audience), it seems fairly clear from all the recorded
observations of His own contemporaries, from the
Benedictus onwards, that the fixed hope was of the
coming of a Messiah, who should set up a Kingdom,
presumably an earthly kingdom, after triumphing over
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH 75
the Romans and the other enemies of the chosen people ;
repentance for sin was indicated as the proper attitude in
face of this approaching world-epoch, otherwise there
was no definite theology on the subject.
It was part of our Lord's teaching to identify Himself
with the promised Messiah, and in doing so to correct
and fill out popular conceptions of what salvation,
redemption, and judgment meant. It was also part of
His teaching to identify the Kingdom of Heaven (or
Kingdom of God) with — what ? Surely in the first
instance, surely where the contrary is not stated, the
earthly, Davidic kingdom which His hearers would be
expecting. He has to take gross, materialistic ideas,
and terms as the symbols of those ideas, and invest them
with a fresh meaning in order to prepare the way for that
spiritual kingdom which (He told Pilate) His servants
would not attempt to achieve by force. This is true,
above all, of the parables, in which the phrase "the
kingdom of heaven " is often too rashly assumed to refer
to our future existence after the Second Advent, although
a very httle study of Patristic interpretation shows
that in most cases there is at least a strong stream of
tradition which identifies the Kingdom of Heaven with
the Church militant on earth.
I say this was part of our Lord's teaching, but, as He
Himself told His Apostles, it was not in the full sense
part of His public teaching, for out of the crowds who
heard His parables only a few, a chosen few, were meant
to understand them. " To you (the Apostles) it is given
to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to
them it isnot given. Therefore do I speak to them in
parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they
hear not, neither do they understand.'' In a word,
76 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
the economy of the future Church was set forth only in
a mystery, in language so clothed with allegory that the
unfriendly critic — above all, the Pharisee, note-book in
hand and pencil behind ear — would miss its signifi-
cance ; miss it altogether at first, and then gradually
become alive to it, till after the parable of the wicked
husbandmen, one of the last of all, " they knew that He
spoke of them." In three main points, especially,
it is necessary to re-interpret the popular ideas about the
Kingdom of Heaven in the light of the Christian Church,
(i) It is to include Gentiles as well as Jews, and the
Gentiles are to be included as in their own right. (2) It
is to precede the General Judgment, and that by a con-
siderable interval. (3) It is not to be a perfect kingdom
in the sense that there will be no traitors and no repro-
bates among its members.
(i) The rejection of the Jews as a race, and their
displacement (in large measure) in favour of the
Gentiles under the New Dispensation is the secret
of nearly half the parables. The Jew is the son
who undertakes to work in the vineyard and does
not ; the Gentile is the one who refuses and then
relents. The Jew is the elder son who has never left
his Father's house ; the Gentile the prodigal who is
welcomed (it seems so unfairly) on his return home.
The Jew is the early-hired labourer, who has borne the
burden of the day and the heat ; the Gentile, called at
the eleventh hour, is made equal to him. The Jew is
the rich man who fares sumptuously every day, and,
though he has Moses and the prophets, has not learned
to believe ; the Gentile is the beggar who seeks to feed
on the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, " and
no man gave unto him," the very same phrase that is
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH ^y
used of the prodigal. The Jew is the invited guest who
accepts the invitation and then cancels his acceptance ;
the Gentile is called in from the highways and the hedges.
The Jew is the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not
as other men are ; the Gentile is the repentant publican
who goes home justified. The Jewish people are the
fig-tree which, fruitless, still cumbers the ground ; even
now the Gardener of Gethsemani is praying that one
more chance may be given to them. The Jewish people
are the unfaithful husbandmen who are to murder the
King's Son ; the Gentiles are those " other husband-
men " to whom the vineyard will be given. Thus the
Ecclesia of the New Covenant, the " faithful remnant "
whom the prophets had declared to be the inheritors
of God's Kingdom, is not to be a further selection within
the already-selected Jewish people, like the 300 whom
Gedeon selected from his already-selected 10,000. The
new circle is to intersect with the old, and the calling-out
will proceed according to some new, some not merely
national basis of qualification.
Small wonder that our Lord should have made this
point part of His secret teaching, otherwise He might
well have been haled to judgment at the beginning of
His ministry instead of the end ; as it was His accusers
could not, even at the end of it, make out a coherent
case against Him. Small wonder that even in the Early
Church the admission of the Gentiles to Christian
privileges should have been matter of earnest discussion
and slow concession ; St. Paul himself speaks of it as a
mystery, only latterly and only as it were grudgingly
revealed. " According to grace," he says to the
Ephesians, " the mystery has now been made known to
me, which in other generations was not known to the
78 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
sons of men, as it is now revealed to His holy Apostles
and prophets in the Spirit, that the Gentiles should be
fellow-heirs and partakers of the same body, and co-
partners of His promise in Christ Jesus." This, then, is
the first "mystery" of the Kingdom of Heaven, but
our Lord tells His Apostles of the " mysteries," not
merely " the mystery " — what else had they to learn ?
(2) However the first hearers of the Christian preach-
ing may have conceived beforehand of the " kingdom "
which the Messiah was to institute, they clearly thought
that something was going to happen quite suddenly
which would revolutionize the state of mankind.
Whether the chosen survivors were to be introduced all
at once into a new mode of existence, or whether for a
period, perhaps for a thousand years, there was to be a
reign of entire peace, prosperity, and holiness on the
earth, with a general Resurrection at the end of it, they
must clearly have imagined that the present world
dispensation was running down to its immediate dis-
solution. In correction of that impression, our Lord
is at pains to represent the extension of His kingdom as
a gradual process, in the parable of the leaven, and
(giving it a more concrete form) in the parable of the
mustard-seed. But there is another parable in which
He deals with the question e% professo — that of the
pounds, which He delivered " because they thought
that the Kingdom of God should immediately be mani-
fested." In this parable, the conspirators who plot
against the King's life are obviously the Jews ; it
remains, then, that the servants, faithful and unprofit-
able alike, should be the chosen of the new dispensation.
It is expressly said that the nobleman goes into a far
country, obviously to suggest a long absence. It is the
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH 79
same suggestion that is made in the parables where the
householder (or whoever the hero of the parable may be)
is said to sleep — the familiar idea of God leaving His
servants on their probation. " And when it was now
noon, Elias jested at them, saying. Cry with a louder
voice, for he is a God ; and perhaps he is talking, or is
in an inn, or on a journey ; or perhaps he is asleep, and
must be awaked." " Up, Lord, why sleepest Thou ? "
is the familiar cry of the Jew in distress, and it was, no
doubt, an acted parable when our Lord suffered Him-
self to sleep in the boat on the lake, when His disciples
were threatened by the storm. " The kingdom of God
is as if a man should cast seed into the earth, and should
sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring
and grow up whilst he knoweth not." So, too, the
bridegroom tarries in the parable of the ten virgins.
What does all this mean, but that the new dispensation
which is referred to as the " kingdom," is a dispensation
in this world, of long continuance, during which God
continues to hide Himself, as He did from His chosen
people hitherto, in order to put His servants on their
probation ?
(3) And if they are on their probation, then it follows
that the final selection is not yet accomplished ; there
are foolish as well as wise virgins in the kingdom. Hence
the twice-repeated phrase, " many are called, but few
are chosen " — the Christian equivalent of the old Pagan
tag, " Many are the bearers of the thyrsus, but few the
true bacchants." Many are " cletoi," that is, members
of the " ecclesia," now as heretofore, but among these
many " cletoi " only a certain proportion are actually
" eclectoi " — in our language, predestined. The Jews
cancel their acceptance of the invitation to the marriage
8o THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
feast, but it is not therefore to be supposed that all who
sit down at that feast are the chosen servants of God ;
it is possible to be one of the banqueters and yet to have
no wedding-garment. Two parables quite clearly
treat the same issue ex professo : that of the cockle among
the wheat, and that of the net drawing in all manner of
fishes. The field in the parable of the cockle is the
world, not explicitly the kingdom ; but the net is
obviously the kingdom, not simply the world, and yet
there are worthless fish even inside the net, which are
brought to shore (that is, to judgment) with the others.
Look at it which way you will, the Church, in our Lord's
own forecast, is not the Church of the predestined.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this point
for our conceptions as to what the Christian religion is
meant to be. For the Calvinist theory of the Church,
which was the only logical alternative proposed for
Cathohcism at the time of the great European apostasy,
was precisely that the Church in the true sense is simply
the number of those souls whose names are written in
heaven who will eventually be saved. That is to say,
the true Church was of its very nature invisible. And
the assumption of all that great mass of latitudinarian
pietism which passes to-day for Christianity is in effect
the same, namely, that in all rehgious bodies there are
to be found really Christ-like, really " converted "
souls, and that everyone is a member of the true Church
if and in so far as he answers to that description. Which
seems a very excellent and a very "spiritual " idea —
only unfortunately, as we have seen, it is precisely not
the idea Christ taught. The Church to which He
invited the Gentiles was by its very charter a visible
Church.
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH 8i
There must, obviously, be two theories of the Sacra-
ments to correspond with these two theories of the
Church. Those who beheve in an " invisible " Church
think that they are going to have it all their own way
when they get to the 3rd and 6th chapters of St. John.
" Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy
Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God " — does
that mean that a mere outward, mechanical act, the
spilling of a few drops of water, seals the soul indefect-
ibly for heaven ? The idea is monstrous ; we must,
therefore, interpret the reference to " being born of the
Holy Ghost " as implying an intelligent, voluntary
acceptance of the grace offered in baptism ; in other
words, conversion. The man who is once really con-
verted does really enter the Kingdom of God, no mere
earthly kingdom, but an eternal inheritance. " If any
man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever ; and the
bread that I will give is My flesh for the life of the
world." What a promise ! "As the Hving Father
hath sent Me, and I live hy the Father, so he that eateth
Me, the same also shall live hy Me." The sacramental
presence of Christ is actually compared, in the intimacy
of its union, with the circumincession of the three Persons
of the Blessed Trinity. Could such guarantees be
attached to the mere reception of an outward token by
the lips of one who may be, all the time, a hardened
sinner ? The idea is monstrous ; we must, therefore,
understand that the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament
is true only for those who receive with worthy disposi-
tions, and not merely those who receive hie et nunc with
worthy dispositions, but those who will, as a matter of
fact, persevere to the attainment of everlasting Hfe.
In a word, as the Church is a spiritual Church, so the
82 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
Sacraments are spiritual Sacraments, and the material
channels which are used in them are only helps to our
weak human imagination.
We cannot directly counter this allegorical inter-
pretation of a passage that cries to be taken literally
from our Lord's own words, except indeed by pointing
to the actual formula with which He administered the
first Eucharist. For, when He uses allegory, the idea
which He treats allegorically is the predicate of the sen-
tence, not its subject ; " I am the Way," I am the Good
Shepherd," " I am the true Vine." This habit of speech
might cover such a phrase as " I am the hving Bread,"
and an allegory might exhaust its meaning. But it
quite certainly does not cover the phrase " This {i.e.
that which I hold in My hands) is My Body." " This
which is being poured out for you is My Blood." But
if we will turn from our Lord's own words to those of
that faithful disciple of His, who is often gratuitously
hailed as the Apostle of Protestantism, we shall find,
in a passage to which too little attention is ordinarily
paid, a direct denial of the Calvinist theory of Church and
Sacraments.
After a long passage (i Corinthians, chaps, viii. and ix.),
in which he has disposed of a laxist opinion in favour of
eating meats offered to idols, St. Paul leaves, appar-
ently, the argument from public scandal and devotes
himself to the argument from danger of lapse into
heathenism. " Know you not," he says, ** that they
that run in the race all run indeed, but one receiveth the
prize ? " This means, clearly, that there will be also-
rans, that is, nominal Christians, and that the whole
" field " will outnumber the Christians who will finally
be saved ; many are called, but few chosen. And then, at
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH 83
the beginning of the next chapter, he falls to comparing
the two ecclesiae of God, the Church of the Old Covenant
and the Church of the New. " Our fathers were all
under the cloud, and all passed through the sea. And
all in Moses were baptized in the cloud and in the sea,
and did all eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the
same spiritual drink ; (and they drank of the spiritual
rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ)."
He proceeds to rehearse the various backsUdings which
disqualified some of the Israelites for the attainment of
the Promised Land, and concludes, " Wherefore, he that
thinketh he standeth, let him take heed lest he fall."
The parallehsm in all this is perfectly unmistakable.
The Israelites are said to have been baptized " into
Moses " just as Christians are said to be baptized " into
the Name " of the Father, and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost. The passage of the Red Sea, with its
suggestion of burial, and the pillar of fire that accom-
panied the host of Israel are both old symbols (as you
find them in the Liturgy of Holy Saturday) of Christian
baptism. It is possible, then, to be baptized into the
Ecclesia of Christ, and yet to fall short of salvation,
quite as much as it was possible to be baptized into the
Ecclesia of Moses, and yet fail to reach Canaan. The
reference to baptism is explicit ; parallelism demands
that the second half of the argument should be as
definite a reference to the Blessed Sacrament. The
" same spiritual food " is the manna, which our Lord
Himself identified as the imperfect type of the Living
Bread that was to come ; the water that flowed from the
rock does duty for a type of the Chalice, presumably an
allusion to the piercing of our Lord's side at the Cruci-
fixion. In fact, just as it was possible for many of the
84 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
Israelites to eat the manna and drink from the spring
that were the pledges of God's especial care for His
people, and yet fall away from Him in the desert, so
there are those whose participation in the Sacrament
of Unity marks them out as members of the new Ecclesia,
whose names are nevertheless not written in heaven.
The theology of this last point is, of course, drawn out
still more unmistakably by St. Paul a few chapters
later, when he is discussing dispositions for the reception
of the Holy Eucharist. " Whosoever shall eat this
bread or drink the Chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall
be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord . . .
he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and
drinketh judgment to himself, if he discern not the
body of the Lord " — here we find that the Sacrament
of Holy Eucharist, so far from being a mere aid to
faith designed to inspire devotion in the worthy
recipient, has actually such virtue in itself that it has
its effects — terrible effects — upon the sacrilegious soul
that profanes it.
When, therefore, it is suggested (as you may see it
suggested almost any day in one or other of the news-
papers) that if the Christian rehgion is to retain its hold
over the allegiance of men in our times, we must get back
to the " Christianity " of Christ or of His immediate
followers, they are simply presenting the public with a
mare's nest. For they mean by such language a
Christianity which is not merely shorn of all definite
dogma (which is beside our present purpose), but either
lacking all outward organization or possessing only such
outward organization as was confessedly human in its
origin and conception. And this is, in effect, to revive
that old dream of the mediaeval heretics, the " invisible
THE ORGANIZED CHURCH 85
Church," a company of pious souls all bound for heaven,
with no hierarchy except such as could be measured
by degrees of personal holiness, and no Sacraments save
as symbols of an interior devotion already felt. Whereas
the actual " Christianity " of Christ and His immediate
followers involves a Church which is to replace the old
" Church " of the Jewish people, differing from it in
dispensing with all tests of nationality, yet resembling
it in being an organized, visible community. It includes,
and administers Sacraments to, unworthy Christians
to whom that adherence will be useless, that participa-
tion even actively disastrous. That is the Church of
Christ which it is man's business to find. Men dispute
our claim to represent the Church of St. Peter ; let us
ask them whether it is they or we who belong to the
Church of Judas Iscariot ? Whom our Lord called,
although He knew that he would be lost.
For the Church is not merely the continuation, but
the reflection of the Divine plan according to which God
took manhood upon Himself. In the Incarnation,
God could only reveal Himself in proportion as He con-
cealed Himself, in proportion as He became hke us in
suffering and in obedience, only without our follies,
only without our sins. So in the Catholic Church a
supernatural reality is manifested to us in human guise,
marred to outward view by the imperfections of all her
members, and stained by their crimes. The Church
perfected in heaven is the jewel God stooped to covet,
but to purchase it He must buy the whole field in which
it is buried, and the treasure must He hid until the pur-
chase is completed. We do not know why God values
the outward and the earthly as well as the inward and
spiritual ; we only know that He does so, because He
86 THE ORGANIZED CHURCH
created us in His Image, because in our image He
redeemed us. We should not have designed such a
Church as His ? Perhaps not, but then, should we have
designed such a world as His ? The Church, if she is
His, must bear the pinxit of the Creator in her very
imperfections.
VI.
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER.
By Canon WILLIAM BARRY. D.D.
How far the supernatural influence which, after St. Paul,
we term " Inspiration " (2 Tim. iii, 16), defines not only
the message but the concrete shape and speech of Holy
Writ, has long been a question in the Schools. I am
not proposing to argue that question. But, as was to
be anticipated, the Keepers of the Deposit have at all
times agreed with popular feeling, which required that
the " form of sound words," handed down from a
venerated past, should not suffer alteration. On the
other side, a sacred language is ever tending to become
a dead language by mere lapse of time and change of
culture ; the problem therefore must arise how to deal
with Scripture as a portion of the Liturgy and as a
decisive authority in teaching. Shall it be strictly
confined to the original form in which it was given,
intelligible only to scholars, or shall it be rendered into the
prevaiHng dialect ? Moreover, since Judaism made
proselytes and the Gospel is to be preached among all
nations, did not the Gentiles need a version out of the
Hebrew and Aramaic, while in the Latin world even
Hellenistic Greek was never generally imderstood, and
the Barbarians who came down upon the Roman Empire
brought their own languages with them ?
87
88 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
This enquiry seems to have entered on the historical
phase, one episode of which is the occasion why we meet
to-day, comparatively soon after Alexander's conquests
had opened Egypt and Asia to Greek ideas, say between
300 and 100 B.C. The centres of the " new learning "
were at Antioch and Alexandria ; but its importance
for us hes in a single word, the '* Septuagint." It was
a translation, first of the Pentateuch, then of all the Old
Hebrew Testament, made by Jews for Jews, completed
before the Christian era in the Common Dialect, and show-
ing imperfect, very unclassical acquaintance with Greek.
It took certain hberties in rendering the original, toned
down its bold anthropomorphism, and created almost
a new language. That it was held to be inspired, was
quoted by the New Testament writers as Scripture, and
all but invariably by St. Paul, explains why so many of
the Fathers, St. Augustine among them, revered it as
equal to the divine original. Nevertheless, it is a com-
pilation due to unknown authors, by no means uniform
in merit, although precious beyond any other version
in virtue of its antiquity. We might even term it in
substance the Old Testament of the Cathohc Church.
Next in age to the Septuagint among versions come
the Old Syriac and the Old Latin, belonging to the
second and third centuries of the Christian era. Ter-
tulHan refers to a Latin version (Adv. Prax. 5 ; Adv.
Marc. 5), and St. Cyprian quotes from it constantly ;
it is still recoverable for the whole of the New Testament ;
in a somewhat modified form (the Galhcan) as regards
the Psalter ; in fragments of the Pentateuch, Joshua,
Judges, Job, and Esther ; and in the Deutero-canonical
books or portions transferred to our actual Vulgate. We
have been accustomed to speak of it as the Vetus Itala,
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER 89
following a possibly corrupt reading in St. Augustine
(De Doctr. Christ, ii. 15). Was it of purely African
origin ? The authors we do not know ; a number of
partial versions may well have existed. In any case,
the Old Latin had affinities not with literature but with
the so-called " rustic language " ; it gave a word-for-
word and often barbarous rendering of the Seventy ;
and in the fourth century was corrupted by popular
usage.
Coming now to St. Jerome, whose work was undertaken
at command of Pope Damasus (died 384), we may sum
up his immense achievements on the Bible-text as
follows: Between 382 and 391 he revised the Latin
version of the Gospels and St. Paul's Epistles ; of the
Psalms and Job according to the Seventy ; and made
a second revision of the Psalter in accordance with
Origen's " Hexapla." Whether he translated the whole
of the Septuagint is disputed, and it remains improbable.
His oft-repeated emphatic phrase, the " Hebraica
Veritas," gives us to understand that he no longer
believed in the inspiration of the Septuagint. Does
anyone hold it now ? From about 390 until 404-5 he
was mainly absorbed in rendering the Hebrew Old
Testament directly into Latin, not omitting the Psalms ;
but he also revised what had been previously left un-
touched by him of the New Testament. The Psalms
from the Hebrew we possess ; they have never been
taken into the Liturgy. The books of the Second Canon
he scarcely handled, except by a hasty version of Tobias
and Judith from the Aramaic.
I have recited like a herald names and dates in a dry
catalogue which, nevertheless, represents an enterprise,
carried through from first to last by one man during a
90 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
quarter of a century, which for its vastness and never-
ending consequences it would be hard to parallel, im-
possible perhaps to surpass, in all literature. Origen's
labours may have been still more extensive ; but even
as regards Holy Scripture they did not bear fruit like
Jerome's, and at this day we find rather a memory than
a monument of the " Adamantine " among Christian
teachers. St. Jerome's colossal undertaking was at
once creative and organic ; it gave to Western Christen-
dom the permanent reading of that Revelation in which
those nations believed, and it guided them on by moulding
their religious language towards the type of civilised
order thus delineated. When Jerome began his task,
by order of the Holy See, what he found was confusion,
" as many manuscripts, so many texts " ; infinite
variations and a barbarous Latin, unworthy of the sub-
lime original. By the time of St. Gregory the Great his
better version had won its place and was the acknow-
ledged standard ; then it became the Vulgate (first so
called, perhaps, by Roger Bacon), the common text, and
the Old Latin shrank into a curiosity of literature except
where preserved by Church usage as in the books of
Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. For about a thousand years
the Bible to Western Christians signified the Latin of a
Dalmatian scholar and monk who, partly while serving
the Pope in Rome, but chiefly as a recluse in his monastery
at Bethlehem, and working almost alone, had translated
much of the Scriptures again and again, mastered the
whole, discovered a style of language beautifully fitting
it, and bestowed on us the supreme literary production
of the Roman Church. I hail St. Jerome, therefore, as
the Great Interpreter. We might even say the
" dragoman," for he was required to cast a hbrary
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER 91
of Oriental volumes, Semitic in thought and imagery
no less than by their language, which bore no rela-
tion to Latin or Greek, into a form congenial at
once to the dechning Roman world and the advancing
Barbarians, whose children would receive baptism.
Latin itself was to be baptised by a miracle of con-
version, and at the same time this old and new
idiom was in such a manner to be handled that it would
easily survive when the Imperial speech of Rome broke
up into the Romance dialects to which it gave place.
From Hebrew and Hellenistic Greek to Latin ; but this
Latin again, not the rhetorical involutions of Cicero, nor
Livy's pictured page, neither Horatian nor VirgiHan, but
simple, elevated, moving hke the primitive style which
it sought to reproduce ; and, yet once more, capable of
being domestic, famiHar in their mouths as household
words, among tribes that were not of Itahan, still less of
Jewish pedigree — such was the amazing problem in fact
offered to St. Jerome for solution by Pope Damasus.
Let me quote Dean Milman's graceful tribute to his
success in dealing with it.
" This was his great and indefeasible title to the
appellation of a Father of the Latin Church. What-
ever it may owe to the older and fragmentary versions,
Jerome's Bible is a wonderful work, still more as
achieved by one man, and that a Western Christian.
It almost created a new language. The inflexible
Latin became pliant and expansive, naturaUsing
foreign Eastern imagery, Eastern modes of expression
and thought, and Eastern rehgious notions, most
uncongenial to its genius and character, and yet
retaining much of its own pecuHar strength, solidity,
and majesty. . . .
92 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
" The Vulgate was even more, perhaps, than the
Papal power the foundation of Latin Christianity."
(Mihnan, L.C., L 95.)
It is, at any rate, certain that St. Jerome's version of
Holy Scripture did become the rehgious code of the West;
setting it free in this respect from dependence on Greek
authorities. It contributed powerfully to make Latin
the language of the Church and to keep it so. It inspired
the boundless medieval Christian Uterature, from the
sacred offices contained in Pontificale, Sacramentary,
and Breviary, to the innumerable volumes of devotions
and private prayers, while the philosophy and theology
which together form what is known as the scholastic
system borrowed terms and quotations from it without
ceasing. Thus it served to express the visible rites, the
active inteUigence, and the union of the spirit to which
Rome gave a living centre. One faith, one Church, one
Bible — a triple cord which was not easily broken.
Well, then, might the EngUsh translators of 161 1
acknowledge of St. Jerome how he had executed his
task, " with that evidence of great learning, judgment,
industry, and faithfulness, that he hath for ever bound
the Church unto him in a debt of special remembrance
and thankfulness." More, however, must be added to
this commendation. In presenting future ages with an
authentic Bible, the Saint was obeying the Pope, and
keeping the injunction before him, " No Scripture is of
any private interpretation." Hear a very late modem
on this subject — I mean John Ruskin : " Partly as a
scholar's exercise, partly as an old man's recreation," he
says in his pecuUar way, " the severity of the Latin
language was softened, like Venetian crystal, by the
variable fire of Hebrew thought ; and the Book of Books
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER 93
took the' abiding form of which all the future art of the
Western nations was to be an hourly enlarging interpre-
tation. And in this matter," he maintains, " you have
to note that the gist of it hes, not in the translation of the
Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into an easier and a
common language, but in their presentation to the Church
as of common authority." He concludes: "When
Jerome died at Bethlehem, this great deed was virtually
accomplished ; and the series of historic and didactic
books which form our present Bible (including the
Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent
thought of the noblest races of men, as a direct message
to them from [their] Maker." In an earlier passage
Ruskin had observed : " It is a singular question how far,
if Jerome at the very moment when Rome, his tutress,
ceased from her material power, had not made her
language the oracle of Hebrew prophecy, a literature of
their o^\^l, and a reUgion unshadowed by the terrors of the
Mosaic law, might not have developed itself in the hearts
of the Goth, the Frank, and the Saxon, under Theodoric,
Clovis, and Alfred." {Bible of Amiens, in Works,
Vol. 33, 109, no.)
Providence had chosen to shape the future by guiding
the Holy See when it established the Canon of Scripture
on lines of tradition against the pseudo- Bible of the
Gnostics ; even as, in the second century, the Episcopate
became the bulwark of dogma threatened on all sides by
the same ubiquitous lUuminism. What happy gift, we
may enquire, was bestowed on St. Jerome, so that in the
moment of danger and decision his enthusiastic long-
continued studies in every line of literature should have
quahfied him for this particular task ? His reading, as
St. Augustine knew, was universal, his memory a portent,
94 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
his faculty of working without a break incredible, and
his temper only whetted by opposition. These were
notable advantages. But another was probably one
which he shared with men hke the Senecas, or Martial,
or Prudentius, namely, that he was not strictly speaking
a Roman. Bom at Stridon, a place where Dalmatia
bordered on Pannonia, he manifested the sort of pro-
vincial independence which has been remarked in the
Spaniards I have just enumerated, and in African
writers, such as TertulHan, Cyprian, Augustine. He
studied under the memorable Donatus, and dreamt that
he was a Ciceronian ; but happily the accusation was a
dream. St. Jerome's own Latin is admittedly pure,
idiomatic, and correct in grammar as copious in vocabu-
lary. He was an accompUshed man of letters, a some-
what florid rhetorician, but no philosopher, httle given
to poetry, and in disputation highly impetuous. He
loved facts and details, geographical, historical, personal.
Not being a metaphysician, he moved among the subtle
Eastern dialecticians rather at random, but kept his eye
on Rome. The abundant commentaries on Scripture,
which fill volume after volume of Vallarsi's edition,
quote current opinions and have the merits of an En-
cyclopaedia, not the meditative or mystic reflection
famiUar to St. Augustine. Hence, St. Jerome has been
reckoned with St. John Chrysostom and the School of
Antioch, which dwelt much on the letter of the Bible,
despite a passing and evanescent adhesion to some of
Origen's views, on the incidents of which it is not now
the time to enlarge. We may define him as a late Latin
" grammarian," a Bible scholar and critic of the hteral
type, and a translator on definite though more or less
unrecognised principles. He did for the Hebrew
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER 95
Scriptures in Latin a service in many ways resembling
that which Cicero did for Greek philosophy in his
Tusculan volumes and other speculative treatises. But
in method there is no proper likeness between Cicero
and Jerome.
What is translation ? It has been called a literary
device by which imequals are represented as equals ;
for, except in strictly measuring science with its exact
sjTubols, no two languages can be reduced to an identity,
and the less they belong to the same group so much
greater will be the difference. Something, then, must
be sacrificed in the attempt. Robert Browning would
require of a translator, "to be hteral at every cost save
that of absolute violence to our language," were it a
question of giving in EngUsh a work immensely famous
like the " Agamemnon." Cardinal Newman says, " In
a book intended for general reading, faithfulness may be
considered simply to consist in expressing the sense of
the original." The Septuagint, deahng with a sacred
text, aimed at accuracy by the closest adherence to the
words in their order, doing violence to such Greek as the
translators knew. And this was the rule observed
hkewise in the Old Latin, which now enables us to re-
cover no small portion of the Greek New Testament as
their text gave it. Scholars who yearn after primitive
readings naturally favour this transHteration, as I am
tempted to style it ; but from a literary point of view it
would seem to defeat its main purpose, by leaving the
matter itself strange and uncouth. Browning's transcript
of the " Agamemnon " fails to win us, certainly does not
charm, and remains a mere curiosity. Had St. Jerome
" transcribed " the Scriptures on a method so repulsive,
their fortunes in the West would have been very different.
96 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
His general aim in translating was to give the meaning
as well as he knew how, " non verbum e verbo, sed
sensum exprimere de sensu " (Epp ad Pammachium, ad
Suniam). Careful scrutiny of the most authentic
Vulgate readings, made in comparison with what we
may suppose to have been the Hebrew text before him,
tends to confirm this opinion, which we can also verify
in any particular section by simple expedients. Of
course the translation varies in quaUty ; I have always
greatly admired the historical Books, the Prophets, ajid
the Book of Job ; and am glad that so competent an
authority as Kaulen confirms my predilection (vide also
J. A. S3nTionds' Essays). Jerome was proud with good
reason of his Samuel and Kings. It must be granted, I
think, that he added emphasis to some Messianic allu-
sions ; occasionally his Latin compresses, it rarely
expands the Hebrew ; and he avails himself now and
then of other Greek versions besides the Seventy, as
Aquila, Symmachus, &c.
But I hasten to his great, his crowning merit. I
remarked that he differs from Cicero when turning his
original into Latin ; and this he does by permitting the
Hebrew, so far as possible, to control the structure of his
composition, whereas the Roman orator keeps to the
native period, or at least subdues to it the Greek authors
whom he was importing. More clearly stiU, — the
vocabulary, the lexis, of Jerome is Latin undefiled ;
the syntactical order and construction are simpUfied to
the utmost, that so they may match or reproduce the
Hebrew. This was a miraculous stroke, with infinite
happy consequences. The classic style no more ; but
one which had a wealth of Christian associations ; which
the Church could claim as her own : which would
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER 97
dominate and inspire the new-springing languages of
the West ; which, finally, would consecrate on our altar
old Roman terms, purged of their Pagan memories, or,
as I have said, baptised in the sacred stream of Jordan.
That many of such terms had been already adopted is,
of course, true ; but in the Bible now they were stereo-
typed, made indehble, and so full of strength to recover,
that when cast out of the EngUsh Bible by Tyndale they
came back under Coverdale and keep their place in it to
this day. It is impossible to exaggerate the spiritual
and literary importance of a standard thus created, set
up for a thousand years in sight of the nations, and
ruling their heart, their fancy, their conduct as on an
identical pattern. They would have been exceedingly
slow to assimilate the artificial verse and prose of Rome's
Augustan age ; but the Hebrew stories, songs, and
prophecies, given to them in a simple moving rhythm,
could not fail to become their dearest treasure. The
Middle Ages are hke a vast Museum, picture-gallery,
and sounding-board of the Bible — St. Jerome's Bible,
from which it might seem all their art and wide realms
of their poetry and romance were derived. Yet, a
curious observation must not be passed over. If by
his version of the Scriptures holding a supreme rank
among books, this rude Istrian from the Danube had,
as it were, dethroned the hterary Senate of Rome, he
provided a shelter in which they might take refuge,
thajiks to the monastery with its scriptorium where his
own work was unceasingly copied. Hallam has ob-
served, and a recent author echoes the statement, that
" unless this Church [the Roman] had thrown a halo of
sanctity over the Latin tongue by retaining it as the
language of her Bible and her worship, as well as the
98 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
channel of her diplomatic intercourse, her ecclesiastical
education, and her rehgious study, the fate of classical
learning must inevitably have been sealed." {Middle
Ages, III., 335 seq. ; Hoare, Our English Bible, 15.)
A time arrived, haughtily declaring itself to be the
Revival of Letters, when those very classics which the
devotion of Christians to their Bible had, ex ahundanti,
preserved, were made an occasion and an instrument
to dethrone baptised Latin for the sake of Horatian
Sapphics and Alcaics, and in favour of Ciceronianising
our prayers, hymns, and lections of the Breviary. The
effect we can judge without my dwelHng upon it. Only
this I am prepared to maintain, that in comparison with
Patristic and Medieval Latin, of which the Vulgate is
chief, with saintly writings such as those which extend
from Cyprian and Augustine to Bernard and Aquinas,
culminating in the Imitation, modem Latin works,
be their subject never so rehgious, seem Hke shadows
compared to sunHt and Hving realities. There is a
glory of the Church in her language that she did not
borrow from the Renaissance, and that no pastiche
derived from the Gradus ad Parnassum will adequately
reflect. On this most urgent, in some aspects most
melancholy subject, I am happy to beheve that the
restoration of the genuine Vulgate text will have a
powerful and good effect.
It would now be in order to enlarge the horizon by
considering how the Latin Bible gave rise to partial
versions founded on it, during the centuries in which
neither Greek nor Hebrew was matter of learning in
the West. For many ages they were not wanted, since
the only readers were clerics and cloistered nuns, ac-
quainted with ecclesiastical Latin. But in due time
ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER 99
they began to appear, — portions, I mean, like the
Psalter, the Gospels, and some histories from the Old
Testament. I have given a copious Hst in the preface
to my Tradition of Scripture, beginning with St.
Aldhelm and King Alfred, coming down to the year
1520. It may be said almost to cover Western and
Northern Europe. In the second half of the thirteenth
century a small group of scholars, among them Roger
Bacon the Franciscan, projected a translation direct
from the Hebrew. By that time undoubtedly St.
Jerome's text had been spread in countless majiuscripts,
and was liable to extensive corruption. Then came the
printing-press, and among its very first books was the
Latin Bible in 1456, which we call the Mazarin ; no
fewer than ninety-eight complete editions were pub-
lished before the year 1500. The first German Bible,
founded on St. Jerome, came out in print not later than
1466. Fourteen translations of the Vulgate into German,
five into Low Dutch, are known to have existed before
Luther imdertook his self-appointed task. From a
collation of these with his Bible it is evident that he
consulted previous recensions, and that his work was
not entirely original. (Cambridge Modern Hist., I. 639.)
Luther's Bible opens a fresh era, no less decidedly
than did St. Jerome's eleven hundred years before.
Two roads divide, the Catholic leading up to the Council
of Trent and onward to the Sixtine and Clementine
recensions, approved by their respective Pontiffs ; and
the Protestant, which has developed into a number of
Bible Societies, scattering millions of copies in hundreds
of languages all over the world. On this consummation
I have only the briefest concluding remarks to offer.
Although non-Catholic translations profess to come
100 ST. JEROME THE INTERPRETER
direct from the original tongues, the influence of the
Vulgate may still be traced in them. Especially may
we follow it through the long and compHcated series of
English versions down even to the last Revision.
Wy cliff e, as is well known, had recourse only to the
Latin ; if it be held that his choice of a particular dialect
determined the subsequent translators to imitate him,
consider how much this implies. When I say Wychffe,
I am using the name impersonally for a national move-
ment, since we do not find evidence of the man's own
share in translation. Tyndale certainly wished to make
an absolute beginning ; but Coverdale's version was
derived from " the Dutch and the Latin," i.e. the
Vulgate, as he frankly admitted. And Coverdale's
happy renderings have been largely preserved in sub-
sequent Bibles, as in that of Rogers, called by him the
" Matthew " Bible, in the Prayer-Book Psalms, and,
above all in the Authorized Version of 1611. This
latter work, which has grown to be the standard text
for the whole EngHsh-speaking world outside Cathohc-
ism, owed corrections and emendations of importance
to the Rheims New Testament, which was as Hteral a
version of the Latin Vulgate as its very learned authors
could achieve. It follows, then, that St. Jerome, by
virtue of his piety, genius, industry, and approval from
the Holy See of Rome, enjoys a kind of Bibhcal ubiquity.
No English translation is there upon which he has not
left his mark. To the future as to the past he will be
known as " Doctor Maximus." And if ever the
Authorized Version, its errors purged away, should be
reconciled to the Cathohc Church, not a httle of St.
Jerome's work on the Bible, direct or indirect, would be
discerned by exploring eyes within its pages.
VII.
THE GENESIS OF A MYTH:
A Note on the Supposed Origin of Tobit (Tobias.)
By the bishop OF SALFORD.
I WAS greatly surprised a year or two ago to read in the
annual survey of publications and discoveries issued by
a distinguished learned society that my late lamented
friend and colleague, Rev. Prof. J. H. Moulton, had
solved the origin of the Book of Tobit (Tobias) by shew-
ing that it was a translation, or rather a Jewish redaction,
of a Mazdean or Zoroastrian folk-story, and that he had
succeeded in restoring the original narration, which he
had published in his learned and really valuable work,
Early Zoroastrianism, being the Hibbert Lectures for
1912, published in 1913 (WilUams and Norgate). The
discovery was proclaimed sans phrase, and I ha\e little
doubt that in due course the statement will find its way
into some of the popular little manuals of condensed
learning to be found on our bookstalls and become a
recognised scientific " fact." Now I was all the more
interested in the statement of the above-mentioned
annual report as I had assisted at the very birth of the
hypothesis in question and followed the subsequent
phrases of its growth and development. At a small
meeting of the Manchester Oriental Society some years
ago, Prof. Moulton suggested in a very tentative way the
idea that had occurred to him that the Book of Tobit
lOI
102 THE GENESIS OF A MYTH
possibly was based on Persian or Magian material,
alleging two or three ingenious reasons which seemed
to support the suggestion. I remember thinking and
saying at the time that the hypothesis appeared based
on at least plausible arguments, but which to me
seemed rather far-fetched. When Moulton's excellent
Early Zoroastrianism was pubhshed, the hypothesis
appeared full-fledged and occupies an important part
of the volume, including a special appendix, The
Magian Material of Tohit, an exceedingly elaborate piece
of work, supported by abundant notes. Let us be quite
fair. Prof. Moulton, unlike those who have run away
with his reconstruction, honestly warns us that the
whole structure is hypothetical. He writes :
" The hypothetical reconstruction referred to in
Lecture VII, ad fin. is transferred to the more modest
position of an appendix, lest incautious readers should
fancy either that I am giving them a scientifically
restored document, or that I seek for laurels in the
unfamiliar field of fiction. My story is only a vehicle
for points which can be more easily exhibited in this
form. I need only observe by way of preface that the
names are chosen from Old Persian, mostly at random,
and Avestan words translated into that dialect, on the
assumption that the story was thus current. It might
of course have circulated in one of the other languages
used in Media. The specimens of Magian wisdom
which I have put in the mouth of the old man, the
hero's father, I have selected often on Pahlavi
evidence alone, and I must enter a preliminary
caveat against assuming that Magian teachers really
used such language at the date when this tale may
be supposed to have originated. I claim no more for
THE GENESIS OF A MYTH 103
them than that since Parsi priests some centuries
later credited them to antiquity, and they are in
keeping with the system estabhshed by research,
we may plausibly assume the Magian origin of these
as of other elements actually found in our Jewish
Book."
Nothing can be more honest than this statement ;
though subsequently Dr. Moulton seems to have taken
up a more positive attitude, for in a later work he writes,
without any reserve, of "the Median originals of Tobit
and Tobias when they went forth to deal kindly by the
corpses of the faithful, and took their harmless necessary
dog with them."i The earliest tentative suggestion at
the table of our Oriental Society had thus apparently
become in its author's mind, — after passing through the
stages of an elaborate hypothesis — simply a fact.
It is not my purpose in this note to discuss in detail
Moulton' s theory, — not even either to refute or support
it. I am rather concerned in pointing out how a mere
conjecture, a strictly hypothetical reconstruction, is
gradually getting accepted as one of the proven facts of
science. It is a legend, or if you Uke a myth, at whose
birth we have assisted.
Before concluding, however, there are one or two
remarks I would like to make concerning some of Dr.
Moulton' s arguments.
(i) The name of the demon Asmodeus naturally
stands in the front rank. Christian exegetes were long
ago puzzled when it was stated that here we have clearly
the name of a Zoroastrian demon, *Aeshmo-daeva, the
^ The Treasure of the Magi, Oxford University Press, 191 7,
P- 153-
104 THE GENESIS OF A MYTH
demon of wrath, and efforts were made to substitute a
purely Semitic etymology, such as Ashmedai from a verb
shamad, to destroy, and it was urged that the supposed
Avestan form never occurs. As far back as 1884, how-
ever, I was able to shew that such a form did really
exist. In the important Pehlevi work Bundehesh
(xxviii. 15) is found the name of a demon written
Aeshmsheda, which, according to the now generally
accepted reading of these supposed Semitic ideograms,
would have been pronounced *Aeshmdev, strictly
corresponding to an Avestan *Aeshmo-daeva and there-
fore to Asmodeus.^ But not much importance can
be attached to this fact : even in the New Testament the
name of a heathen deity, Beelzebub, is applied to the
prince of devils !
(2) The names Tobit, Tobias, seem greatly to have
impressed Dr. Moulton as containing the Semitic
element tob = good, whilst in the Behistan cuneiform
inscription there are two old Persian names Vahauka
and Vahyazdata, though not of father and son, con-
taining the element vahu = good. He proceeds to
" translate " the Hebrew names straightway into the
above Persian ones !
(3) A very leading feature in Prof. Moulton' s story is
the part he assigns to Tobias' dog, which he would bring
into connexion with the Parsi sag-did, or "dog's glance,"
so efficacious a protection at the moment of death. In
a footnote, however, he loyally quotes the objection
raised by myself to this argument, as follows : —
" As a serious offset against the approval of the
editor of Tobit in the Oxford Apocrypha, pubUshed
^ Philosophie Religieuse du Mazdeisme, Louvain, 1884, p. 84
THE GENESIS OF A MYTH 105
while this book was passing through the press, I
have to record Bishop CasartelU's dissent, in an inter-
esting letter to me (June 6, 1913). I cite the main
part in full : —
" ' The book strikes me rather as being of purely
Jewish origin, but certainly written in a Mazdean
[Magian you would say] milieu, and directly pointed
against prevailing Mazdean ideas and practices as
found all round. Hence the insistence on earth-
burial as even a sacred work, directed against the
ideas of nasus, corpse-pollution, etc. The very dog
seems brought in as the purely domestic house dog
— the "harmless, necessary" dog, — stripped of all
superstitious ideas of the Sag-did. The old father
is blinded by a swallow's dung, i.e. probably by a
bird belonging to Ahura Mazda's realm : physical
evil therefore is not merely a creature of Angro-
Mainyus; and so on. I think this theme could be
plausibly worked out.'
" In a further letter (June 13) he adds : * I did
not mean to suggest any very overt "polemic" in
Tobit. It might have been all the more telling if
merely implied in the redaction of the book, apart
altogether from the question of its origin.' "
So far Dr. Moulton.
I do not intend to go through all his arguments, but
only mention the above three as among at least the
most plausible. But when all has been said, his "re-
construction " of the "Median folk-story " remains a
purely hypothetical piece of very clever work, strictly
a romance like Quo Vadis or Ben Hur.
I hope it will not be considered out of place to express
io6 THE GENESIS OF A MYTH
appreciation of the solid erudition and transparent
honesty of one who had just risen to the rank of a fore-
most Avestan scholar, when he was so tragically and
prematurely carried off, a victim of "German" or rather
Austrian " f rightfulness," on 7th April, 1917. May I
be permitted as a personal friend to conclude :
Quis desiderii modus . . . tam cari capitis?
VIIL
APPENDIX.
Dr. Coulton and the Heavenly Witnesses.
By the Rev. C. Lattey, S.J., M.A.
In his pamphlet, The Roman Catholic Church and the
Bible (pp. 18-19 in both editions) Dr. Coulton writes as
follows :
The text of the Three Heavenly Witnesses, for instance
(i John V. 7), which disappeared forty years ago from the
AngUcan Revised Version, not only remains still in the Vulgate,
but a special Papal decree of 1897 has expHcitly forbidden the
faithful to "deny or call into doubt" the authenticity of this
interpolation, which no theologian outside the Roman com-
munion would dare to defend as genuine. For years, therefore,
Roman Catholic Bible-study has been in this impossible
situation. Every Roman Catholic theologian with an ele-
mentary knowledge of textual criticism is aware . , . [there
follows a summary of the textual evidence]. . . . Yet if, while
this decree stands still unrevoked^, a Roman Cathohc Professor
of theology should pubhcly draw from these universally-
acknowledged facts the common-sense conclusion which every-
body else has drawn, and if he had the courage to stand by
his own words, he would be cut off from his Professorship and
from the communion of his Church.
But this absurdity, on the face of it almost incredible, has
behind it a very sufficient reason from the point of view of
ecclesiastical disciphne. In the great acumenical Council of
1215 (4th Lateran), Innocent III. incautiously argued from
this spurious text in his condemnation of Abbot Joachim's
doctrine of the Trinity; and everybody who joins the Roman
CathoUc Church has to subscribe to the Creed of Pope Pius IV. ,
which binds him to "receive unhesitatingly all things handed
down, defined and decreed" by this Lateran Council among
others. It is therefore almost as difficult for the Church to
admit the results of scholarly research in the case of the Three
Witnesses as in that similar case of Gen. iii. 15. . . .
1 In a note to the second edition this is corrected to " while this decree has
any living force."
io8 APPENDIX
It will be observed that in this second paragraph there
is no longer question, as in the first paragraph, merely
of an obedient silence, but of what is involved in a
positive profession of faith, and the conclusion is in-
evitable — though I have since been given reason to
doubt whether Dr. Coulton really meant to draw it —
that "every Roman Catholic theologian" professes
belief in what he knows to be untrue. Surely this is
enough to explain "the concentration of all my critics
on this particular point" (ed. 2, p. 44), so far as there
was such concentration, without regarding it as a mere
matter of strategy! Judging, after some private dis-
cussion with others, that the matter had not been
sufficiently cleared up, and chiefly with an eye to our
own Catholics, I determined to prefix some further
remarks upon the subject to my own lecture upon the
Prophets. Dr. Coulton had disappeared from the
Congress at an early stage, being pressed to finish up
some necessary work, as he explained to me, before going
on his holiday. In his second edition Dr. Coulton
reprints my remarks from the Tablet; I reproduce them
here from my original manuscript, but the differences
are absolutely insignificant:
Before coming to the proper subject of my paper, the prophets
I may perhaps be allowed to offer a few remarks on the subject
of the passage in the New Testament often called the passage
concerning the Heavenly Witnesses (i John v. 7), which was
brought up in a pamphlet pubhshed in Cambridge a Uttle before
the Congress, and has also come up for discussion during the
Congress itself. I desire to make four points clear:
(i) I think I may safely say that hardly any scholar,
Cathohc or otherwise, would nowadays deny that the passage
is an interpolation in the text, that it was not present either in
the original Greek text ot the New Testament, or in St. Jerome's
original translation.
(2) In spite of an assertion to the contrary, I also regard it
as clear that Pope Innocent III. in no way commits himself to
APPENDIX
109
the text, but only brings it in where he is quoting the Abbot
Joachim, who used the passage. The Pope's own definition
does not come tih later.
(3) The Council of Trent declared the Vulgate authentic,
that is, official. It is clear from contemporary documents that
this was not done because the Vulgate was considered faultless,
but, among other reasons, because it was considered safe. The
decree of the Holy Office that has been often alluded to {Acta
Sanctae Sedis, Vol. 29, p. 637) declared the passage of the
Heavenly Witnesses authentic in the same sense; that is, it
was part of the then official Vulgate, and such it was to remain.
This interpretation was confirmed to Cardinal Vaughan, to
whom it was explained that textual criticism as such was not
touched. {Revue Biblique, Vol. vii., i8g8, p. 149.)
(4) Finally, it has been said that Catholic professors,
knowing the passage not to be geniune, dare not manifest their
knowledge pubUcly, for fear of being turned out of the Church.
To this it is a sufficient answer to indicate two works, pub-
fished with a Catholic imprimatur: (i) Das Comma Joanneum
by Dr. Kiinstle, pubfished some years ago by Herder, wherein
the author argues well for the view that the passage of the
Heavenly Witnesses has for its author PriscilHan — not therefore
St. John or St. Jerome. (2) Dr. Vogels' edition of the New
Testament in Greek, pubfished last year by Schwann of Dussel-
dorf, wherein the passage does not appear in the text at all,
but only among the rejected variants at the foot of the page.
I hope, therefore, that I have made it clear that Cathofic
scholars may and do treat the passage as an interpolation, and
that the accusation of dishonesty made against them is without
foundation.
The argument from the two printed books — others
might be mentioned — is so decisive as practically to
dispose of the whole matter; and indeed Dr. Coulton
appears to realize its force, but none the less devotes
nine pages of close print to covering his retreat, with
M. Loisy and his career for smoke-screen. Two points,
however, he urges in a way that calls for some further
comment :
(i) Dr. Coulton writes in his main text, " Innocent III.
incautiously argued from this spurious text" (p. 18),
following in this a mistake of Prof. Pohle in a Catholic
work. Herder's Realencyclopddie (ed. 2, p. 45). In reply
no APPENDIX
I point out that Pope Innocent III. is merely quoting
the Abbot Joachim, whom he is condemning. Dr.
Coulton now writes (p. 46) that the Pope "showed no
hesitation about accepting the verse as a sound basis of
argument." As a matter of fact there is no sign as to
what the Pope thought about the verse as a "basis of
argument," and my own assertion remains true, that
"Pope Innocent III. in no way commits himself to the
text."
(2) Dr. Coulton finds my explanation of the word
authentic as meaning official, "a most extraordinary
perversion of a plain word. . . . Father Lattey may
safely be defied, I think, to produce any authority for
using the word authentic in this sense, until the days
when modem apologists first thought of escaping
through this misinterpretation from an otherwise un-
tenable position" (p. 46). And yet it was to "contem-
porary documents" that I appealed, and indeed I in-
dicated the main document to Dr. Coulton at the
Congress, though only cursorily, pointing out to him
my appendix on "the Vulgate reading in i Corinthians
XV. 51," in the Westminster Version, and the reference
in the footnote to Pallavicino, Istoria del Concilio di
Trento, lib. vi., cap. xvii. " When the Fathers of Trent,"
I have written in that appendix, "made the Vulgate
the official version of the Church by declaring it authentic,
they by no means intended to guarantee all its readings ;
on the contrary, difhculties were raised in Rome on this
head, and to secure the Pope's approbation of the decree
the legates at the Council had first to explain that the
Vulgate was adopted as the official version, not because
it had no mistaken readings, but because it had never
been convicted of heresy." The relevant passage in
APPENDIX III
the letter is given by Pallavicino. Vega also, one of the
theologians at the Council, in his work De lustificaiione
(Book XV., chap. 9) mentions that one of the legates at
Trent, Cardinal Cervini, told him several times that the
Fathers adopted the Vulgate, not because it was free
from wrong readings, but because it was safe.
In the light of all this it is clear in what sense the
deputies for abuses at Trent recommended that only
one edition of Scripture should be allowed as authentic
{Concilium Tridentinum, ed. Societas Goerresiana:
Tomus v., p. 29; and see Vulgata editio in index), and in
what sense the decree of the Council itself should be
understood. Even in the preface to the Clementine
Vulgate, itself referred to by Dr. Coulton, it is plainly
imphed that the edition is not perfect textually; it is
said, for example, that the object proposed was to
restore the Vulgate text, not to correct it. The fact is,
Dr. Coulton has not realized what a big thing it was to
make the Vulgate the official text, and what important
results that measure still has even today. He speaks
as though it were a matter of no consequence at all,
just as it suits him to speak slightingly of the Revue
Bihlique ; in dealing with these matters he is a little out
of his element.
Nevertheless, since the title of his pamphlet is The
Roman Catholic Church and the Bible, I regret that he
should not have done the Church the justice to admit
that she has been practically alone in this country in
steadily defending the divine truth of the Bible as the
written word of God. From abusing her for not making
enough of the Holy Scriptures, Protestants have passed
and are passing to abusing her for making too much of
them. After pinning their faith to the Bible and the
112 APPENDIX
Bible alone, in a manner entirely contrary to the teaching
of the Bible itself, they have come and are coming to
treat it with no more respect (if not indeed with less)
than they would a merely human document. Mean-
while the Catholic Church holds fast to the golden mean,
following therein the teaching of Scripture itself. To
ignore such tremendous facts as these, while raising a
multitude of relatively minor issues, is surely to come
near to straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
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